Holy Roller Novocaine
by Curiously Strong
Summary: Hunter is still a moron. Silas is still babysitting him. Tension keeps building and Hunter keeps playing with matches much too close to Silas' ever shortening fuse. Part 2 of a Sgt. Scream trilogy now complete. Feedback welcome.
1. Qadiya

Here is my second foray into the world of Over There FanFiction. Since I find it easier to use nicknames only in conversation, the names with their respective nicknames are below in case anyone suffered my particular type of amnesia are:

Capt. "**The Duke**" Baron

Lt. Alexander "**Underpants**" Hunter

SSgt. Chris "**Scream**" Silas

Pfc. Esmeralda "**Doublewide**" Del Rio

Pfc. Tariq "**I guess they got lazy and just went with Tariq**" Nassiri

Pvt. Frank "**Dim**" Dumphy

Pvt. Avery "**Angel**" King

Pvt. Brenda "**Mrs. B**" Mitchell

Pvt. Maurice "**Smoke**" Williams

Geography-wise this is set in northern Iraq and while I use real towns' names I am not above moving stuff around on a map to suit my needs. Bianca, I know this drives you bananas but you shouldn't drink so much coffee anyway. PS: I'll try to give more lines to the little people on this one but I heart Sgt. Hotness so don't quote me on that.

* * *

First Lieutenant Alexander Hunter looked from his watch to the Humvee waiting for him and clenched every muscle in his body to get across ten yards that looked more like a hundred. His stomach roiled making a loud noise like a pipe clearing air before water gushed out again. He took the long way around the rank latrine he'd just visited extensively and swore, in his mind, to abstain from powdered egg omelets for as long as he lived. He had little interest in the mid-morning run to Qadiya he felt had been slopped on his plate as punishment for transgressions he had yet to figure out.

For once, he'd been tempted to agree with his second in command that satellite towns with limited access-ways were not a good place to be on nothing but radio chatter most of which would be planted to begin with. Hunter climbed in the front passenger's seat with the sun on his face and a stomach cramp gearing up in him. He glanced at the driver with disinterest, unable to recognize the man behind the wheel through squinted eyes. As far as he was concerned, the sixty-seven miles to Qadiya was the exact length of eternity.

In the truck in the middle, Pvt. Brenda Mitchell sighed exasperated when SSgt. Silas' radio behind her crackled to life, signaling the start of another day's work. It'd been rainy all week and the novelty of cooler weather had worn off as fast as the mud started coating every porous surface in the camp. The sunny morning had not helped, having cooked mud puddles everywhere into a sticky gunk that was even harder to clean. She pushed the accelerator with enough might to get onto the main road and controlled the forward lurch with the brake. Conversation in the back of the truck resumed. Brenda tuned out; reciting every prayer she could remember to make the trip a boring one.

"What's the smallest car you know of?" She asked looking at Del Rio beside her.

"I think those MINI coopers. Why?"

"Then I'm buying one of those. I'm sick of this stupid truck," Brenda muttered under her breath.

She fell into a groove as they ate up more and more of the black tar road. Sgt. Murphy was setting a brisk pace in the Humvee leading the way and the gunner, with half his body peeking from the roof, looked like a Labrador as he kept an eye on the very light traffic keeping them company. Hunter's helmet bobbed in her rear view mirror when she checked at intervals and the praying worked as they slowed to accommodate the worsening condition of the narrowing street and the signs pointing the way to Qadiya began showing up.

"Was this Underpants' idea?" Williams asked gruffly as the first significant pothole threw him up then down on the hard bed of the truck.

"Nope," SSgt. Silas said after a while of silent deliberation. "He thinks he's being punished for not kissing enough asses."

"So what the hell are we doing here?"

"Earning your sign-in bonus Dimwit," Williams answered.

"Qadiya's been quiet for months." Tariq looked over his shoulder in Silas' direction surprised by the conversational voice. "They got maybe a three shops and a goat left then bang for thirty-six hours the radio won't stop squawking so intel starts paying attention to the chatter. The half that makes any sense is bullshit and the rest of it they can't figure out. That's where we come in, to be on the safe side."

Once there, Qadiya proved to be a waste of the six signs leading to it. From her seat in the cabin, Pfc. Esmeralda Del Rio had the second best view of the shithole ahead and she found it was lacking at least an oversized ball of twine or a giant skillet short of a decent photo-op Mr. Del Rio might enjoy. The main road, peppered on each side with dilapidated cars culminated on a mosque with walls like Swiss cheese before doing a number eight on itself like two links in a flattened double helix. Most of the low-slung, square buildings were missing crucial parts like doors, roofs and on occasion entire walls whose rubble had long since been recycled for patch up jobs on adjoining structures. Nine goats and a cow with ribs like piano keys looked up from a balding patch of grass in front of the mosque and followed the trajectory of the three vehicles wreaking havoc with their mid-morning routine. Pvt. Mitchell hit the brakes as Sgt. Murphy slowed to a stop in front. On the bed of the truck, five pairs of eyes examined the stillness around them. SSgt. Silas jumped out first glad to be on his feet after the hour's drive. He stared down the largest goat and won. One by one the animals lost interest in the new arrivals.

Sgt. Murphy walked around the back of the first Humvee to join his and Silas' squad as the medic riding with him ran to replace him in the driver's seat. The gunner scanned the immediate area and watched Pfc. Del Rio replace the second Humvee's driver before he began a headcount. Lieutenant Hunter looked at fourteen straight faces and scrambled for an inspirational way to relay his orders. The noise of the truck's engine turning over bought him time. He followed the procession down the street where it turned around to wait, ready to go. A third wave of stomach cramps cut his inspiration short.

"Sgt. Murphy, you and your squad take one side of the street. Sgt. Silas your squad will take the other." Hunter slapped his thigh to signal the end of the powwow and took the first step towards what needed to be done. "Let's go!" He yelled when no one followed. SSgt. Silas cleared his throat.

"Aren't you forgetting something Sir?"

"What sergeant?"

"What we're looking for? An objective maybe, Sir?"

"If I knew that we wouldn't be here now would we sergeant?" Hunter hollered not as furious as he was interested in saving face. "Anything out of the ordinary; we were briefed together." Murphy's men filed down the sidewalk on Hunter's tail after he and Silas, with the economy of movement innate to career Rangers, decided whose turn it was to babysit.

"GI Joe, where are you going?" SSgt. Silas asked Dumphy who true to his orders was already crossing the street. "That's $1,500 worth of livestock right there and I doubt they are watching themselves, what do you say we go secure the mosque first?" Brenda watched the action reflected on the rearview mirror from the safety of the cab. She strained to hear what Silas had said and made a mental note to find out when Williams elbowed Pfc. Nassiri and laughed.

"How does he know how much those goats are worth?" King asked no one in particular.

They moved quickly with the experience of countless similar searches under their belts, crouching under the windows as they walked the perimeter of the mosque counting exit routes. Silas signaled to Pvt. Dumphy to hang back watching the only other exit and posted Williams at the door. The cow looked perplexed. Silas was the first through a door that needed no kicking with Nassiri close behind them. They secured the empty nave easily and pressed on cautiously, each man covering a different vulnerable point of their progress. Caution did not make the large, carpeted room sprinkled with hardened pellets of goat poop any less empty. Pfc. Nassiri pushed open the only door at the end of the room and found a dark stairwell behind it. He reached into a pocket and bent one of the plastic light sticks in his left hand until he felt the inner glass tube break. He shook it, needlessly, out of habit and let the eerie green light it emitted lead the way. SSgt. Silas trailed him and Pvt. King downstairs kept an eye on the back of Williams' uniform outside and the entire first floor. The light was useless and he pocketed it as they emerged from the stairwell onto the second floor walkway open to below. A walk-through took less than a minute with no windows or doors to worry about.

At the end of the hallway when they'd come around full circle, SSgt. Silas signaled Tariq to slow down. He pointed at the kinked green telephone cord snaking into an unlit room from a jack on the wall. Four circles on the floor directly under the jack outlined the legs of a table where the phone had probably stood in better days. SSgt. Silas bent to pick up the cord as Tariq positioned himself by the door. The former counted to three with his fingers and yanked the line from the jack as the latter subdued the door with a swift kick.

"On the floor, on the floor, on the floor," Tariq yelled at the sniveling man crouched in the dark utility closet hugging a green rotary dial telephone tightly. He repeated the orders in Arabic and pulled the limp man by his collar of a dirty, striped shirt. Shaking from head to toe, he let go of the telephone and did as told.

"Who were you calling?" SSgt. Silas barked squaring a boot between his shoulder blades as Tariq secured Flex Cuffs around the wrists. "Who thefuck were you trying to warn?" Tariq translated echoing the particular inflection of each of Silas' words. The response was a smattering of blubbered, unrelated syllables that neither man understood.

"Who?" A radio crackled to and for a fraction of a second Silas thought it was his. Tariq kept his M4 trained on the man's head while Silas bent over to look for the source of the static. He pulled a yellow walkie-talkie from a pant pocket.

"They are asking him to come in Sergeant," Tariq said when the walkie-talkie quieted down. Silas dropped the radio a foot to the man's head and fired a single shot into the hard plastic casing. The brand new prisoner's crying resumed when a shower of bits of hot plastic rained on his head. Silas ground his cheek against the carpet.

"Who?" he yelled.

"Hotel," the man said in English with a high pitched voice. "Hotel," he sobbed hysterically. "Hotel."

* * *

I am getting somewhere with this I swear; it just takes me a while to set things up just so. As always I welcome, in fact I thirst for opinions.

Thy author.


	2. Switcheroo

Hello boys 'n' girls. Here's chapter #2. I changed to the title because the FF profanity filters thought the prior title was much too indecent. "Holly Roller Novocaine" is the title of a song by the Kings of Leon. It's okay if you don't know who the heck they are, no one seems to do and yet I dig them nonetheless.

I don't own nobody but itdoesn't stop me from borrowing them to write about them. Let me know if you like it peoples!

* * *

Pvt. King heard the shot fired and found himself halfway up the stairs before his brain had any say on what movement came next. Tariq patted down the man on the floor and removed the rusty semi-automatic Makarov held in place by the waistband of his underpants. He popped the eight round magazine, removed two live rounds noting the disparity in firepower and helped SSgt. Silas, who was already on the radio with Murphy; bring the man to his feet.

"Rawhide four this is Rawhide one, come in, over." Silas hung back letting King and Nassiri drag their prisoner downstairs.

"Rawhide one this is Rawhide four, over."

"Four we got a lookout at the mosque. Repeat lookout apprehended trying to warn hotel. Over."

"Roger that Rawhide one. Rawhide four is en route. Out." SSgt. Silas heard the muffled relay of orders before Murphy clicked off.

He fished a map from his pocket. The streets of Qadiya were ten tenuous lines spread between the figure-eight shaped main road. He had a school, a mosque and ninety foot wide crater where a Ministry of the Interior office had been leveled a year earlier by a car packed with C-4 but no hotel. SSgt. Silas looked at the two UAV photos Lt. Hunter had discarded as useless after the briefing and again, hated that he would have to agree with the man. Taken a day earlier with six hours between each shot, they showed no activity, no difference or sign of traffic, no sign of life at all except the goats. He counted eight smaller worm-like shapes in front of the mosque and a longer one, the cow.

"Eight," he muttered never once slowing down. The second photo came back on top and he counted ten animals again. His radio whined and crackled.

"Come in Rawhide four, over." Silas scanned the first picture looking for the missing animal and found it, after squinting, tethered to a stripped BMW they'd passed on the way in. It was the buck.

"Come in Rawhide four, I got a mosque and a school but I don't got a hotel."

"Rawhide four this is Rawhide one, it's half a klick southeast at the end of the first bend. Over."

"Copy that Rawhide one. Out" SSgt. Silas pocketed his map.

"Get him on the floor Dim," he ordered referring to the bound prisoner as he passed the parked Humvees. Dumphy held the man's arms as he pushed him to a kneeling position with one foot. He lowered him onto his stomach, wiped his hand on the seat of his pants and joined the armed conga line moving down the street. Del Rio and Mitchell each took one end of the cuffed lookout neither woman wanting to speak as the tension mounted and the chances of leaving Qadiya in one piece took a nosedive. Rawhide one joined Sgt. Murphy's men in front of a dilapidated, two story building with half its second floor gone. Hunter was the only one to notice, with disgust he had enough sense not to make public, the goat droppings he flattened in the split second pause every man gathered in the street.

"Sergeant…," Lt. Hunter managed before a glaring Murphy almost covered his mouth with a gloved hand. In brief respite from the stomach cramps, Alexander Hunter had managed to see the glowing upside of the entire mission, ecstatic at the prospect of bringing back results when none had been expected.

SSgt. Silas whispered his orders and split the squad with a brief hand signal. His and Sgt. Murphy's ability to communicate so well on so little made Dumphy think of geishas serving tea before he ducked behind a tall stack of concrete slabs to cover Williams and Nassiri both flattened against the wall beside a back service door. Across the street SSgt. Silas posted Walters, Quintana, Tolliver, Hill and O'Hara, all Murphy's men, at the alleys on each side of the building and at opposite sides of the road where a couple of stripped cars provided reasonable protection from enemy fire. He dropped down and dug in next to Pvt. King inside a shop in front of the hotel. They were Sgt. Murphy's primary line of defense on that side. For all his fearlessness, Lt. Hunter was slightly behind Murphy and Torres the third of five men going in.

Sgt. Murphy was praying in his head. For an Irishman, he wasn't a good Catholic. He was religious on airplanes. He talked to God during the hurricane season since he'd moved to Louisiana but in Iraq he'd found himself talking to God whenever his eleven pound flak jacket felt inadequate for the task at hand and this was daily. He was sure of Torres and Parker and Chang though the three were green virgins. The prayer he finished storming into the first room on the right was not for protection from the enemy but so his life at least for the next five minutes, wouldn't come to depend on Lt. Hunter even once.

"Clear," Torres yelled in one end of the room.

"Clear," Murphy agreed by the door and they followed Chang and Parker into the next.

"Clear," Parker called out.

Hunter took a chance caught up in the momentum. He kicked down the door and went in first. He approached desk inside with caution, breathing through his mouth. The little hairs in the back of his neck were stiff enough to play a violin concerto He fired randomly into the flimsy wood. It was poor cover. The desk skidded back propelled by the bullets then forth when the man behind it returned fire.

The cadence of the two AKM's in his grasp cycling fresh bullets into the chambers ended quickly, less than a second though Hunter fired for three emptying his magazine. The man on the floor with his face concealed by a dirty white rag looked like a magician's assistant sawed in half. Hunter walked out into the hallway and stepped back into the dead man's office just as fast. Bullets whizzed at eye level in both directions outside. Lost in the chaotic noise of his own making he had failed to distinguish clashing songs of Russian made assault rifles and the faster, steadier prattle of American M4s.

Across the street, Pvt. King had his scope trained on the first floor. SSgt. Silas pointed at the shadow on the second as it moved closer to the front of the building unaware of the surveillance and reflected cut in two, on a support beam. Silas didn't have a clean shot but King did and he picked off the man with a single bullet thinking grimly about the high school trigonometry that made the moment possible.

Pfc. Walters looked up from his post in the alley as an AK-47 tumbled ownerless from the second floor. He fired up, at nothing, too pumped to realize the imminent threat was dead. Further down, Williams had joined Dumphy behind the concrete planks and Nassiri spotted for them while they returned fire five times faster than the shooters holed up within. Inside, in the room across from Hunter, Torres recognized the sound of a pump action shotgun being reloaded. He fired into the skinny wall as the spent shell hit the floor and missed.

The wood wall shattered no match for a shotgun's power and Torres' vest took the worst hit. The impact threw him back then on his ass. Chang fired through the hole into the naked chest and watched the shooter go down. He bent over Torres to appraise the damage. He looked where the most blood was gushing; Torres' left arm where shot from the slug had lodged in his buddy's his forearm and then the neck where more pellets had just grazed the skin. He secured a tourniquet in the arm, going over the steps that he'd learned in the first aid classes like a mantra.

Dumphy felt the safest he'd felt in ages behind all that concrete limiting his exposure. He would have doubted his eyes when he noticed the man running out onto the patio if Williams had not seen him too. They weren't surprised by the man as much as by the Russian Dragunov sniper rifle slung across his back like an ordinary backpack while he went at them firing a much more insignificant Makarov pistol. Williams peppered the man with his saw and he danced two full circles like a rag doll before he finally went down.

It was quiet again in the street. It was quiet for a full minute before Sgt. Murphy peered out of the room where he'd taken cover with Pfc. Parker and they walked the length of the hall flat against the wall. Nassiri ran inside as Tolliver and O'Hare closed in from the front. SSgt. Silas signaled to King to stay put and did the same with Quintana and Hill clearly yearning to get closer than their posts by the stripped cars. He saw Sgt. Murphy come out of the building. The engine noise of the approaching Humvees closed in. Chang helped Torres walk out as much for the moral support as for lending a hand. The medic jumped out of the Humvee and went to work immediately.

Everyone but Hunter still holed up with the dead body, Dumphy and Williams covering the back and Pvt. King across the street gathered before the shot up hotel for a headcount. Murphy and Silas did the first walk through, inspecting every room as the men behind them checked the dead faces against the 'Wanted' photocopies each of them carried. Nothing turned up.

SSgt. Silas took the stairs to the bombed out second floor. Sgt. Murphy followed. They covered each other picking through the rubble. Silas saw the man King had taken out from the first floor. The shot had gone in through his back piercing a lung. Like the others downstairs, he was dressed in western clothing. It'd been a slow death. They moved methodically towards the right though no more shots had been fired, clearing each enclosed though roofless space like before. Murphy was the first to see the woman.

She was standing against the wall, hands up with the palms out. Her skin was leathery and her clothes crusty. Her dark eyes followed every motion eagerly without moving an inch.

"On the floor, now," Silas yelled menacingly pointing in case his instructions were not clear enough. Murphy covered him.

Footsteps bounded up the stairs at the sound of Silas' voice. She remained motionless against the wall and he pushed his M4 aside, taking instead his sidearm while Murphy stepped to his right to keep her in his sights. She stood still. Silas took her right wrist in his free hand and pulled her off the wall intending to get her on the floor to secure her with Flex Cuffs. In a movement so fluid it could have been choreographed, she slipped her left hand in her pocket and stabbed his right thigh screaming something Tariq could only determine was spoken in Farsi. She was worse off with a round from Silas' M9 in her chest and another from Murphy's M4 through her neck.

Silas stepped back too pumped full of adrenaline to feel more than mere annoyance at the stabbing pain in his leg. Blood gurgled in the woman's throat as she slid down the wall making a sound that Pvt. Williams downstairs might have described as a bubbling, homemade bong. He looked down at his thigh and tried to assess the damage through the rip in the fabric. Sgt. Murphy walked around the dead woman and knelt beside her. He retrieved a crude shiv from her pocket, wiped it clean on her dress and held it up, handle first for Silas to take.

He closed his hand around the dirty taped handle and looked into green, glassy eyes fixed somewhere in the distance. He saw Jamila. Silas blinked back the sweat dripping into his eyes and the dead woman was old and dark eyed again. He felt dizzy. The tan, leathery skin turned pale and young a second time. He shook his head and took a step back.

"Hey man, are you okay?" Sgt. Murphy asked.

"Yeah. Let's go."

* * *

I have no idea what the hell people say to each other on a radio so I just assumed it probably wouldn't sound much like phone sex and made up the rest. I deduced this Rawhide thing was a company nickname like I've read in the news one of the profiled Marines call his company Killer Company and that the number after the Rawhide referenced the squad number. If I got that wrong _please_ let me know so I can fix it.

The rate of fire was figured out mathematically from the M4 specs given in the encyclopedia, I don't know the calculations' feasibility in practice. The only way I have of putting a bullet in someone would involve burrowing a hole first and manually inserting it later.

Thy Author


	3. China White

I own nothing but the words below, I borrow everything else. There are no special instructions today, only suggestions:read, review, and stretch before engaging in physical activity.

* * *

Lt. Hunter was now alone inside the hotel. He burped loudly. Some of the pain in his chest eased but he tasted powdered eggs in the back of his throat and the humiliating memory of shitting his pants earlier as he vomited in the latrine made him feel faint. He sat on the shot up desk with his head between his legs and waited there for half an hour before he felt strong enough to go back outside.

He saw Pvt. Torres from fourth squad sitting in the driver's seat of the second Humvee, his seat, talking to Del Rio and Chang. His tourniquet was gone and his arm was prettily bandaged in white gauze that went around his head twice to hold the wound higher than his heart. He'd be at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany in less than a day where a real doctor had to dig lead shot from his forearm before he could be sent home to recuperate. The medic was now busy with Silas, threading a needle to sew up the irrigated nearly two inch cut in his right thigh.

"Nothing serious right Sergeant?" Hunter asked.

"Nope."

"Let me call this in. We'll get going."

"You do that," Silas said to Hunter's retreating back as Spc. Fallis knotted the last stitch in his leg. He tilted his head to hear Murphy and Hunter's conversation a couple of feet away, glad to leave the babysitting up to someone else.

"Lieutenant," Murphy said as Hunter reached inside the Humvee for the radio.

"Yes Sergeant?"

"Don't you think we should comb this place again before we go, Sir?"

"Not before an EOD tech sweeps through this shithole first Sergeant. Maybe you wanna go around poking into IEDs in this rubble but it ain't gonna be under my command,"

"Sir the Explosives Ordnance Disposal team is tied up with those weapons caches in Nineveh. They probably won't get here another day and then it'll be too late."

"Too late for what Sergeant? Prom? We killed everyone if you didn't notice." Murphy took a deep breath before he answered.

"That's exactly what's bothering me Sir. That woman," he said pointing at the second floor "was speaking in Farsi not Arabic. Even here, nine armed men is overkill to protect ten goats. Don't you think we should at least find out what else they were up to?" The firing neurons in Hunter's brain were almost visible through the thick bones of his skull. He clenched his butt cheeks.

"Suit yourself Sergeant but make it quick."

Lt. Hunter ground his big toe into the sole of his boot trying to focus on something other than his stomachache. He watched in agony as Murphy gathered the men closest to him for a scavenger hunt at the mosque and almost lost it when they gathered around SSgt. Silas and waited for the medic to finish before finally going away. With legs trembling, Hunter waited for Spc. Fallis to get distracted in the cleanup before he ducked back into the hotel and let the stench of the bathroom lead the way.

He pushed the door a third of the way, as far as it would go, slid inside and cringed. Light filtered in through the bullet holes in the wall high above his head and about waist level. The only white spot on the entire toilet was an asymmetric chip in the porcelain water tank where a bullet had taken off a chunk of the brownish crud covering every square inch from the bottom of the bowl on up. He fought his belt with nervous fingers and did his best to keep his pants from touching the filthy floor as he tried to aim his bare ass in the general direction of the toilet. He pulled the collar of his uniform tee-shirt over his nose and mouth and resumed breathing.

"Aww fuck," he muttered as his right boot skidded on something he'd rather not think about. Hunter held on to his pants with both hands, the abrupt movement throwing him off balance. He fell on the sticky toilet seat and in the same breath, simply let go letting relief, however foul its smell as it drained from his body, wash over him.

In the opposite end of town if it could be called that, Sgt. Murphy looked at Silas as he looked at the empty mosque from the door, still unsure of whether or not to take the latter's assurance that he was okay at face value. Silas began unlacing his boots.

"Sergeant?" O'Hare asked cramming everything from what are you doing to what the hell into one single word.

"I'm showing some damn respect for a house of worship," Silas answered lining up his boots against the wall. Dumphy quickly followed suit pleased that such cultural sensibility was not lost on his leader. Nassiri trailed him also unshod. Murphy urged his men to do the same and took off his shoes last though he would have preferred a protective layer of anything between his socks and the goat poop on the carpets.

"Check this out Sergeant," Dumphy said looking at the floor "they brought carts inside the mosque."

"Where do they speak Farsi Nassiri?"

"Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia."

"Iran huh? That's next door." Murphy slowed down to look for more depressions on the carpet.

"Elemental dear Watson," Dumphy said caressing an invisible mustache. "It's weapons of mass destruction. They sneak them past the border police inside the goats." Tariq chuckled and Murphy did too. SSgt. Silas relented last with a close lipped smile appreciating the crack more than the punch line.

"Heroin," he said seriously again. "What's wrong with that carpet?" He asked Murphy.

"It's facing the wrong way," Murphy answered after looking at it. Privates Dumphy and O'Hare walked around the carpet in question looking for obvious booby traps instinctively. They lifted one end slowly and rolled the rug away when neither man blew up. Six heads stared down at a trap door no more than four feet long and two feet wide. Dumphy tugged the piece of rope on the handle and lifted the door off the floor half a foot. Nassiri looked into the darkness and again they pressed on, the fact that they were still in one piece, the biggest indicator of the lack of IEDs.

They looked down at neat brick shaped packages with rounded edges about a foot long each stacked neatly in rows of three each.

"Shit Sergeant, you were right." Dumphy skimmed a brick off the top. "It's a kilo right Tariq?" he added guesstimating.

Tariq took the parcel from Dumphy thumbing the thick brown paper the bricks were wrapped with. He handed it to SSgt. Silas. Knife in hand, Silas cut an L shape in the wrapping piercing the two layers of packaging. He peeled back the cover to expose the compacted white powder inside, scraped a pinch with the knife and licked the tip. He tasted the bitterness in his whole mouth and let enough saliva gather under his tongue to take all the powder with it when he spit.

"It's pure too," he said taking out his radio. "Mitchell, Fallis, come in," he added into it. It crackled to life.

"This is Pvt. Mitchell Sergeant,"

"Get me Underpants Mrs. B," Silas ordered foregoing formalities.

"I can't Sergeant, he's taking a dump right now," Brenda replied.

"You in there with him private?"

"No sir, I can smell it out here." Silas laughed.

"As you were private."

Lt. Hunter was still a no show half an hour later when Sgt. Murphy and SSgt. Silas approached the convoy. They'd left Pfc. Nassiri in charge of the men in the mosque and over seventy bricks of heroin counted out on the floor. SSgt. Silas climbed in the passenger side of the Humvee with Brenda in it. He took the radio between them.

"This is Rawhide one to base, over." He looked out the dirty windshield for the dead minute before the radio crackled.

"Come in Rawhide one, this is base, over."

"Base this is SSgt. Silas; I need Capt. Baron, over."

"Stand by Rawhide one, over." Silas counted the dead bugs this time.

"SSgt. Silas this is Capt. Baron, over," the radio sputtered.

"Captain this is Rawhide one in Qadiya. We got a prisoner, nine dead insurgents, and a cache of at least seventy kilos of heroin, over." He waited for it, the incredulous 'what.'

"What?" It came as he had expected with Capt. Baron no doubt leaning close enough to the radio for a harassment suit. Pvt. Mitchell beside him had an equally astonished look on her face.

"We found a cache of seventy kilos of heroin and counting, sir. We have nine dead insurgents at least one of which was Iranian or Afghani, sir. We are awaiting orders, over."

"Where's Lt. Hunter Sergeant?" Baron asked.

"He's availing himself of the restroom facilities, sir." Silas answered biting his inner cheek to keep a straight face.

"Stand by SSgt. Silas. I need to get battalion on the horn, over and out!"

"Are you serious SSgt. Silas?"

"No Pvt. Mitchell, I'm just calling my commander for shits and giggles," Silas answered gruffly, jumping out of the Humvee as Lt. Hunter walked out of the hotel smiling.

"Found anything Sergeant?" Hunter asked smugly; pretty sure he'd done a good job of cleaning himself up with only an undershirt to use as toilet paper.

"Yes sir."

"What was that Sergeant?"

"At least seventy kilos of heroin. I just called it in to base, sir," he said taking a step back from Hunter, anticipating spittle.

"What?" Hunter asked reddening. "How dare you go over my head with something like this?"

"You weren't available, sir." Silas finally said deciding on that answer over a more biting 'That's not your decision to make bonehead.'

"What did Capt. Hunter say?"

"We are to stand by until he gets battalion on the horn, sir."

"You told him I ordered the search right?" Hunter asked preoccupied although voicing the actual question had probably been accidental. Silas ignored the inquiry and doubled back to the Humvee as Pvt. Mitchell waved. Hunter beat him to there.

"It's not base," Brenda whispered when Hunter yanked the radio from her hand.

"Come in base, this is Lt. Hunter, over," he said into the earphone. He listened intently and handed the radio to Silas. "It's for you," he seethed.

"This is SSgt. Silas."

"Sergeant, this is General Downer. How much heroin did you find, over?" Silas gave the earpiece to Brenda.

"Hold that," he said to her already getting Nassiri on the other radio. "Tariq come in," he added.

"This is Tariq Sergeant, over."

"Done counting yet Nassiri?"

"Yes. 108 kilos total Sergeant."

"Give me your exact coordinates Pfc. Nassiri," he ordered motioning Brenda for a pencil. She gave him a black Sharpie. Silas looked at the marker with no paper in sight and grabbed Brenda's hand. He exposed her slender wrist and jotted down the numbers Tariq gave him on her skin, calling General Downer at the same time.

"Come in General, over."

"Downer," the stern voice responded.

"108 kilos total, General, over."

"Give me coordinates Sergeant." Silas read off the numbers in he'd scribbled on Pvt. Mitchell. The radio crackled. "Your new orders Sergeant," Downer said at last. "You are bringing in your live prisoner only. You are leaving the bodies with the drugs. I repeat you are leaving the bodies with the drugs, over."

"Sir?"

"You got forty minutes before I send in an Eagle to level Qadiya Sergeant, get your men together and hustle out of there."

"Roger that sir, over."

"Good job Sergeant, over and out."

* * *

Okay then, that's Chapter #3 As usual I've put the cart before the horse and I have an ending before I have any idea how to get there. Oy vey.


	4. Pox

Disclaimers remain unchanged. You might soon notice I gave Capt. Cutie a first name. Capt. Cutie is Capt. Baron to anyone who doesn't live inside my head which at the moment is well… everyone. I named him James, James Baron. Oh yeah and I named one of my made up characters after Sgt. Scream's nickname in the Portuguese version of Over There. Thank you Kika-sama for givingme their equivalents.

**_AMRAAM_** stands for Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile. This is commonly known to air crews as the "Slammer."

* * *

Brenda Mitchell wasn't a fan of dead people, especially when their vital organs were visible through bullet holes. She carried a shoe and the dismembered foot still in it and dropped it on the rest of its owner piled on top of nearly 300 million dollars worth of heroin. She slinked back to the truck hoping to end her current contribution to the war effort with the couriering of that one extremity. Lt. Hunter's dead guy had been riddled with so many bullets; his body had been transferred in pieces. When the built in timer in her wristwatch went off, the three vehicle convoy was four miles out of the kill zone on the road back to camp.

Pvt. Dumphy heard the F-15 Eagle before he could see it flying in low and right on schedule. Another minute elapsed until they saw the Eagle poop a 335 pound **_AMRAAM_** rocket and the crown of an orange explosion appear in the horizon. Dumphy never questioned the morality of blowing up a mosque when it would have been much easier to transfer the drugs. He wasn't worried about the carnage or how close he'd come to dying without making his peace with God. Frank Dumphy was worried about the goats. He scratched his head violently, and remembered Eddy at the petting zoo. He hoped the animals, which'd scurried off when they heard the Humvees creeping up on them, would be able to fend for themselves.

------------------------------------

For the first time in nine days, Capt. Baron scratched his head from confusion and not because of the wicked itch that had begun to dictate how he spent every minute he was awake. He read the memo scribbled on the blank portion of his requisition order for 200 boxes of 'Rid'shampoo a fifth time. 'None in stock; please be advised all non-essential supplies have a two week backlog.' He looked at the rubber stamp inside the 'issued by' box and cursed Specialist Attlee's mother.

"Non-essential my ass," he yelled managing to crumple the sheet of paper before he had to scratch his head again. He walked around his tent as much to decompress as to be able to scratch without holding back out of whatever sense of propriety he had left. He crushed a tiny brown nit between his fingers and extended the radius of his walk by three more tents. The line around the sick-call tent went around twice and everyone in it was scratching their heads. The medics inside were scratching too.

He stepped inside the officer's latrine and into one of the semi-private stalls making it a full house. He unbuckled his belt and began scratching again, methodically, head, chest armpits, pubic hair, even the backs of his legs. Two stalls away, Lt. Hunter, the unwitting epicenter of at least the crab lice epidemic, was similarly busy scratching and scratching and scratching until he had tears in his eyes and blood under his fingernails. Baron washed his hands and started back to his office with resolve. He took paper and a pencil from a drawer and sat astride a chair making himself comfortable in front of the radio. It was going to be a long morning.

------------------------------------

SSgt. Silas was taking in the morning sun stretched between two folding chairs in front of his tent. Hank Williams Sr. crooned about a cheating heart in his headphones and the floppy BDU hat he had strategically positioned to cover his face had thus far worked in keeping the world far enough from him so that its questions remained unasked. He sat there with a death grip on the armrests thinking fondly about the three days he'd spent in a coffin sized cage during SERE training at Camp MacKall. Compared to the dreadful itch that had pestered him for the past ten days, the cage where he first got over claustrophobia was a penthouse and waterboarding a recreational swim.

The batteries died in his CD player and he remained still listening to a Homer Simpson soliloquy in a TV set in the distance. It would have been Sunday as usual but for the four-deep convoy barreling down the main road right before the fork into the camp. Silas pulled the hat off his face and looked through the scope in his rifle. At each end of the convoy two armored Humvees and their gunners were escorting an M997 Humvee maxi ambulance and an M1038 cargo carrier both of which bore red crosses on a white background over their sand colored roofs.

Capt. Baron stepped out of his tent very close to cheering out loud. The convoy slowed down as it entered the camp perimeter and his two-way radio announced the imminent arrival once orders had been double checked. The two Humvees escorting the ambulance turned around before the motor pool in a cloud of dust that enveloped their gunners as the remaining vehicles parallel parked behind the medics' tent almost bumper to bumper. Capt. Baron and his secretary started walking in their direction as the doors opened.

A man and a woman jumped out in full desert BDUs wearing subdued rank on their flak jackets and their helmets and doctor's insignia on their sleeves. They were both captains and their name tapes both read 'Harms' over the right breast. Two second lieutenants jumped out of the truck behind them, obviously the muscle in the operation carrying an M4 and a sidearm each.

"Capt. Jerusalem Harms! I heard the latrine rumors…" Baron said with glee that nearly caused him to hug his peer. A second earlier he'd been unsure whether to be happy the end to the hellish itching had arrived or whether to clobber them for taking three days to make it out. Now he put out his hand and shook hers gladly.

"You are never living this one down Baron, it's all over battalion you are running a dog pound full of fleas," she said replacing her helmet with the floppy desert BDU hat.

"Are you still with in Civil Affairs with the 358 or does this mean you got yourself a _real_ army job?" He asked laughing.

"Still bumming it in the Green Zone Captain."

"I don't know how the hell this happened but I'm damn glad they sent me the Ying Yang twins," he said looking at Jerusalem but shaking male Capt. Harms' hand.

"Oh God, it's déjà vu I haven't heard that nickname since you convinced me to go active, what? Five, six years ago?"

"How's Green Zone?" He asked Harms 2 as Harms 1gravitated toward a tray full of ice with water bottles in it. She popped ice cubes in her mouth and crunched them noisily.

"I was lounging by the pool in the presidential palace when your call came in. You need to visit Baron; they let you pick your own staff and the Prime Minister's got a new chef," he answered only half joking. The three captains chatted amicably for a couple of minutes until Baron could no longer resist the need to scratch.

"So, how do you want to do this?" He asked.

"How about we see the people you have on guard duty first and we'll triage everyone else once they are out of the way? Bravo Company is officially out of circulation until I declare you all bug free so let get going."

"Request permission to ask a question, Sir?" Second Lieutenant Berro asked looking at Baron.

"Granted."

"Why do you call Capt. Harms and Capt. Harms the Ying Yang twins if they are not twins, sir?" James Baron laughed. He gestured to the female Capt. Harms for permission to explain. She shrugged smiling.

"Capt. Harms is named after the capital of Israel and her brother is named after the oldest city in Palestine."

"Jericho sir?" He asked perplexed missing the geopolitical reference entirely.

"Kids today," Baron and the two Harms' said in chorus.

------------------------------------

The bullhorn in Capt. Jerusalem Harms' hands screeched as she adjusted the volume. She'd need it to be heard over the fervent scratching going on in the 140 heads gathered before her. Stragglers continued joining the ranks gathered before the sick call tent and inside it; Capt. Jericho Harms was busy setting up shop with the aid of their two lieutenants. Jerusalem took off a pair of non-regulation sunglasses; squirted coconut scented sunscreen into her hand and slathered the cream on her face and neck. Nordic features and alabaster skin were certainly a plus for underwear models but a pain in hundred degree weather. She climbed the bumper of the Humvee being unloaded when the last of the people seemed to arrive.

"All right, at ease everybody. Good morning. My name is Capt. Jerusalem Harms. I'm a doctor. You all have lice but the Army doesn't trust you to read shampoo instructions so I drove three hundred miles through mined roads and inclement weather to make sure you all know how comb lice out of your hair before everybody gets typhus." A hand went up in the back.

"I'll be back in three weeks for a Q&A session, please hold your queries until then," she said singling out the body attached to the inquiring hand. "Now listen up. I don't care how you got lice. I don't care what you are doing in your free time, I don't care how many times you are hitting the showers or washing your clothes, that's all for your preventive medicine specialists to figure out, but I'm here to get everyone treated. If I come back for a follow up and I find out someone didn't follow my _very simple_ instructions and this place still looks like a zoo, I'm going to make it real fucking unpleasant. I want all the females on the right and all the males on the left."

The crowd shuffled from one side to the other trying to locate the dividing line between right and left without drawing it on the dirt. Capt. Harms jumped down from the Humvee's bumper and dragged a second privacy screen inside the medic's tent. There were four large boxes of shampoo by each station and assorted medical supplies in another two boxes behind each of the doctor's folding chairs.

2nd Lieutenant Berro placed a battered boom box on the table and a CD case next to it. Jerusalem popped open the case and slipped a mix CD into the properly marked opening on the player. On the other side of the screen Jericho Harms struggled with the drain hose on a portable swamp cooler already running connected to a generator in the truck. Jerusalem climbed back on the bumper with a ream of paper under and a bag of pencils under one arm. She did a headcount and jotted the numbers down on a clipboard. Several feet further back, as Harms' attention changed to paperwork, Lt. Hunter joined the 177 scratching monkeys under his command hoping his last scratching session lasted long enough to get seen. Harms divided the forms into stacks and put the bag of pencils on the floor. She brought the bullhorn to her mouth.

"Everyone will fill out one of the forms being passed around. You will need one to be seen. You need to know your name, your social security number and how to put a checkmark next to all the symptoms you are experiencing at the moment. Females line up in front of my table, males stay where you are. The first twenty people to be seen will kindly give up their down time to see Lt. Glass and go over furniture and uniform sanitation procedures." Harms turned around and walked inside the tent.

"I better not see anybody trying to move back in line to avoid duty," she yelled without looking back, effectively thwarting the shuffling that her announcement had caused. Already experiencing the relief of treatment from his tent, Capt. Baron laughed.

------------------------------------

"Next," Harms said hanging her jacket on the back of her chair. 'Ziggy Stardust' was blaring from the CD player's speakers in lieu of a more private consultation area. The inside of the tent had finally begun to cool down when Pfc. Esmeralda del Rio stepped inside. She'd been keeping count of the people being treated. She was unlucky customer number twenty.

"Good morning ma'am," Esmeralda said placing her finished form on the captain's table.

"Good morning Pfc. Del Rio," Harms said consulting the paper. "What brings you into my little shop of horrors today?"

"Same as everybody else ma'am. I have crabs. I itch everywhere." Harms took two boxes of shampoo from the tower stacked on her table. She checked off boxes on the 'office use' portion of the diagnosis forms and signed the bottom.

"Undress to your underwear please."

"You need to see the bugs ma'am?" Del Rio asked.

"Affirmative private. In the off-chance you can't make the distinction between homing pigeons and a louse, I have to visually determine you in fact crawling with lice before treatment can be administered."

"Aren't you afraid of catching something ma'am?" Esmeralda dropped her pants.

"Lice can't jump soldier," Harms offered putting on blue latex gloves. She parted Del Rio's hair, checked the proper box on her workup sheet and motioned for the latter to raise her arms. She checked more boxes and stepped back. "You can get dressed now."

"That's it?"

"I can draw some blood with a really big syringe if you think it'll help," Jerusalem joked handing Pfc. Del Rio two boxes of 'Rid.'

"No ma'am," she said pocketing the shampoo.

"You apply that to dry hair. You can use the same shampoo for head and pubic lice so one box is for right now and the other is for follow-up in ten days okay? Body lice only live in your clothes so you should be okay after the uniforms and the bedding gets sanitized and all the couches gets sprayed."

"Is that what we'll be doing with Lt. Glass ma'am?" Esmeralda asked buttoning up her jacket. A new song started playing.

"Maybe not soldier," Capt. Harms said taking off her gloves. "I've been told you are the best mechanic around."

"Yes ma'am?" Pfc. Del Rio said visibly pleased by the compliment.

"I got an M2 burner in my truck. I can't get the heater tank drained. You done any work on them?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Do you think you can take a look at it private?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Hey Butterbar," Harms yelled to her second lieutenant lifting a flap over the window "Del Rio here is gonna show you how to fix that burner. Pay attention."

* * *

Authors note: It's not 100 percentclear whether pediculosis pubis can be transmitted through exposure to icky toilet seats. Pubic lice cannot jump, fly or survive more than 24 hours without a warm body to feed from which makes this method of transmission unlikely considering the relative cleanliness of American toilet seats. For the sake of argument I'll assume that you can indeed catch crabs from a toilet seat and it's not just a lame excuse for cheating boyfriends/girlfriends to explain the creepy crawlies to their unwitting partners. In an unrelated side note, Capt. Jerusalem Harms inspiration was Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition's model Jessica van DerSteen. I just love the way Hubby will buy and conserve an entire subscription for that one issue. I love my X chromosome.


	5. Morpheus

I'm actually kinda sad Lt. Hunter got killed in the end; humiliating him can be so fun. Seriously though, you gotta give major props to Josh Stamberg for playing a character well enough to make it (more or less) universally reviled. Oh yeah yeah yeah, I don't own anyone and the word arrangement is mine.

* * *

Captain Jerusalem Harms picked through a plateful of brown rice as if hoping to find something better underneath then discarded the food untouched in favor of two oranges she was pretty sure had been left on the juice bar for decoration. Off the top of her head she could think of at least a dozen MRE menus more appetizing than the lunchtime leftovers she'd been served by a scowling Iraqi woman manning the serving line. She drained a tall glass of warm instant iced tea made palatable by the juice of two lemons and a quarter cup of sugar then started back to the sick-call tent. The twenty or so people still waiting to be treated had long since procured reading material and folding chairs to whittle away time more comfortably.

"Now serving customer number 16,171," she said with a hint of weariness pushing aside the limp canvas door. It was nearly five o'clock when SSgt. Silas followed her in.

"Ma'am."

"Sergeant." Harms unsheathed a sterile scalpel and quartered the first orange. "At ease," she added offering him one of the peeled wedges.

"No thanks ma'am."

"Hey Jer, you got a second?" Jericho Harms cut in from the other side of the tent. "I need a consult."

"Be right there," she replied standing. "Make yourself at home," she said to Silas with irony not lost on even the stray pebbles on the floor.

Across the screen, as the opening notes of 'Under My Thumb' strained through the boom box speakers, Jerusalem Harms raised an eyebrow at the sight of Lt. Hunter standing stark naked in the middle of the room. His hairy, muscular torso was covered in equal parts red blotches and a rash oozing yellow pus. His thighs were peppered with long red scratches the width of his fingers and tiny bite marks that looked freshly scabbed. She walked around him breathing through her mouth to avoid the sour odor he emanated and wrote furiously on the workup sheet the second Captain Harms had provided.

"We got the mother ship," she said at last. "How long have you been sick Lieutenant?"

"Started about two weeks ago ma'am," he answered reddening from his neck up. Jerusalem walked around him, adding more notes to the paper in her clipboard.

"You should be more particular about toilets Lieutenant." The elongated red marks in the backs of his thighs would have matched any standard toilet seat if compared. "Put your hands on the table and spread your legs," she ordered taking a fresh pair of gloves from the second Capt. Harms.

"Why?" Hunter asked hysterically, cupping his penis with both hands.

"May I ask why _ma'am_, may I ask why _Captain Harms_," Jericho Harms said in a low, effective tone standing in front of Hunter with his arms crossed in front of him. The lieutenant relented and posed as asked.

"What are you taking for the pain Lieutenant?" She secured a surgical mask over her nose and mouth and cringed before spreading his buttocks with her left hand. Hunter whimpered.

"Nothing ma'am."

"Don't insult my intelligence Lieutenant, you have an open sore on your asshole," she said brusquely.

"Lidocaine cream ma'am. I get athlete's foot all the time."

"That's goddamn brilliant Lieutenant; putting a topical anesthetic, probably with dirty hands on an open wound. You should have been a goddamn doctor. You should have called me last night and told me you were going to treat everybody yourself!"

"So what do you wanna do?" Jericho asked quashing the momentum for a full blown rant. "I don't have enough Cefaclor for a full treatment and the Mefoxin is IV only plus they'd need to keep it on ice until it's administered." Jerusalem took off the mask first and the gloves second.

"If this was a simpler infection I could bring the rest of the pills next week but look at his groin! Those lymph nodes look like potatoes. There's scrotal cellulitis, tissue necrosis, I'm gonna need full medical records and major diagnostic blood work before I can give him any meds. I don't even know how walked here today. He needs to go to the FOB for treatment."

Hunter had turned around mid discussion to watch the exchange as if a fourth person's condition was being hashed out and the future being decided was not his. He looked down at the three enlarged bumps along his groin and something in his mind clicked.

"Captain, I'd rather not abandon my post," he said sheepishly. "I'll take what he said, Cefaclor."

"That's not your decision to make Lieutenant," both captains said in unison. Hunter hopped twice towards the table dragging his pants through the floor, reached for his undershirt and bent over to pull up his underwear.

"I don't need hospitalization," he said agitated, taking his pants in his hands, "ma'am, and you can't make me go with you because this may be the Army but I still have legal rights and if I say I don't wan to leave my post then I don't have to leave my post." He finished squirming on the floor with Jerusalem's boot between his shoulders and his pants still tangled halfway down his legs. Jericho Harms turned his back on his sister and began straightening shampoo boxes.

"Lieutenant you are really beginning to aggravate me."

"You can't do this!" Hunter yelled as the CD came to an end. His words hung in the air without the buffer of the Rolling Stones as he squirmed trying to get out from under Jerusalem's foot.

"And yet here I am with all my wits about me while writhe half naked on a slab of plywood with bugs literally crawling up your butt. Don't you just love subtle irony sir?" Under her Hunter relaxed slightly. She took her foot off him and he turned on his back. "Now, from where I'm standing," she continued "you have two choices. You can either agree to get up like the good boy I know you are and go sit outside in the pretty ambulance with 2nd Lieutenant Berro while I finish the work I came here to do or I can drag you out to the aforementioned ambulance hogtied like the little pig you look like right now. What's it gonna be?"

"I'll get dressed," he said meekly.

---------------------------------

"Sorry for the delay SSgt. Silas," Capt. Harms said walking back to her side of the tent where Silas had made himself comfortable on her folding chair. She waved off his attempt to stand up and sat on the table looking over his worksheet as if nothing had happened only six feet away. Harms counted the checkmarks on the yes and no columns and heard her brother's next patient walking in next door. She changed CDs on the boom box and waited until Robert Johnson's "Terraplane Blues' kicked off.

"Please undress to your underwear," she said snapping on a pair of gloves. Silas cleared his throat and stood up, his reaction time a beat off. He folded his BDU jacket on the back of the chair and the shirt over it. Capt. Harms walked around him and rubbed nits off the hair behind his ears. She tapped Silas' shoulder and motioned for him to raise it with a hand standing closer than any junior high chaperone would have liked as she combed the dark hair under his arm for more lice eggs to confirm the diagnosis. She picked up his shirt and looked closely at the seams before scribbling a shorthand version of the findings in the 'physician's notes' box.

"Do you want to hear my highly scientific conclusion Sergeant?" She asked with a half smile.

"Yes ma'am."

"Pediculosis Trifecta! Head, body and pubic lice."

"My um,"

"You can get crabs on your armpits Sergeant," Capt. Harms cut in. "I don't see it often but it only means you probably didn't get it from sexual relations with a… partner of suspect background if you will. You did well not scratching too, there'll be no scarring."

"Yes ma'am."

"You are on Bactroban for ten stitches?" She asked looking down at her notes.

"Yes ma'am"

"When did you get those?"

"Ten days ago ma'am, the first stitches came out early."

"Let me see them." Silas rolled up the right leg of his white boxers. Harms bent down to take a closer look. "Good wound care, neat stitching; your medic took Home Economics Ranger. Any pain? Swelling? Fever?"

"No ma'am."

"I can take these out right now Sergeant, save you a trip to sick call next week."

"Thank you ma'am." Capt. Harms rummaged through supplies looking for a suture removal kit in a mess unbecoming an officer. She discarded generic aspirin, moleskin gauze, scalpels, antibiotics and jungle rot cream.

"Aha!" She punctured the plastic bag keeping all the utensils together and fished out an alcohol prep pad. "Come closer to the light," she said sitting down to have the stitches at eye level. She cleaned the edges of the cut with one side of the prep pad and the surrounding area with the other. "Bar fight?"

"No ma'am."

"I should've known, your juice bar is nothing to write home about," Harms said following the alcohol with an idophor pad. She picked up one end of the suture and cut the first knot almost flush with the skin then pulled the slender thread with forceps and discarded the first stitch on a lined trashcan. "How long have you been deployed Sergeant?"

"Eighteen months ma'am"

"Plus six months training stateside?" She added pulling out the seventh stitch.

"Yes ma'am."

"How do you feel?"

"Doesn't hurt ma'am."

"Ranger, I'm a board certified trauma surgeon and I've been picking lice all day. Don't fuck with me today."

"I'm fine ma'am." Harms sighed exasperated as she affixed butterfly strips along both edges of the newly minted scar. She dropped the tissue forceps and the suture scissors in the open bag with the prep pads, pushed her chair back and cranked up the volume on the boom box.

"How much leave did you sell back on reenlistment?" She asked standing between Silas and the spot in the wall he'd been staring at through the consultation.

"Sixty days ma'am. How did you know I reenlisted ma'am?"

"Not so wild guess Sergeant," Harms shrugged. "You can get dressed now."

"You know Sergeant; my short term memory is terrible and I'm not writing any of this down so even if you tell me the little green people are sending you messages..." Silas nodded. "How are you sleeping?" He looked beyond Harms' head and back. He cleared his throat.

"Not that well."

"Headaches? Irritability? Nightmares? Insomnia?" He nodded. Harms pulled her bag of tricks closer and shuffled the assorted supplies in it. "This is a sleep aid," she said opening a sealed box. She popped four blue pills from their foil packets and slipped them in her jacket pocket. "These are only one milligram each. Start with one before bed and two if there's no improvement. They won't make you groggy if you can get a full night sleep and just so you know, there's no way to O.D. on six milligrams of this stuff." Harms folded the foil packet until it fit inside the box of 'Rid.' "You can throw these out when you get back to your tent but I'll bring more next week in case you don't." She tossed him the shampoo.

"Next."

* * *

Here's my rambling disclaimer after the fact: the timing above is a bit iffy. Sgt. Hotness had been in Iraq for 15 months when he frolicked with the French national yet I'm keeping Hunter alive though he was only on two more episodes after the mattress mambo. The episodes from about #8 on forth are on a pretty tight timeline that would mean setting all this earlier on, scrapping the French national altogether or hoping to find an audience willing to let me play with the time space continuum. I hope it's option 3.

The other obvious note is that I'm not a doctor. I don't even like most of the medical parts of E.R., Nip/Tuck, and CSI so I confess I prescribed using Google and borrowed greatly on my cat's medical records from the time she had parasites and it developed into a pretty bad infection because she wouldn't stop licking her butt. I just really wanted to have fun with Lt. Hunter before he has to be killed off. Again, bear with me, I _am_ getting somewhere, I promise.

Thy Author


	6. Good Deeds

My editor and I are again fighting. My editor drinks too much coffee and she gets enervated because it's like a thousand chapters later and she still has to cut out an average of 500 words per chapter and I still fight to keep each one and in the end I have to agree the 500 words that she took out will not be missed. I'm sorry I'm so pigheaded editor. You are right. Oh yeah and I don't own, I borrow. Don't borrow my words though'cause I'm still kinda touchy about all the nails I've broken typing up this thing.

* * *

Silas sat on his cot feeling anything but fresh or clean. It didn't help matters that the cot was sticky with bug spray or that he'd gone through a whole bar of soap and he still smelled like the pyrethrum in 'Rid.' He pulled clean sheet out his laundry bag, cracked open his foot locker to return the rest of his freshly washed, lice-free belongings to their proper place and pulled the sleeping pills from the second box of shampoo before putting it away. The pills looked insignificant in his hand and he pushed two through the foil backing and put them under his tongue until his mouth filled with the bitter taste of the stuff that would actually put him to sleep. He spit them out and ground them on the plywood with a rubber flip-flop.

It would be another couple of hours before his three tent mates were due to return and he lay back on the hard cot with headphones around his ears and _The Count of Montecristo_ for a pillow. Falling asleep without thinking was tricky and it kept getting harder every day so he welcomed the heaviness in his eyelids and fell into a shallow, restless sleep that was still, he told himself, sleep.

------------------------------------------

"Sergeant are you sleeping?" Pvt. Frank Dumphy asked poking his head into the lion's den. Being pest free had been excellent for spirits but done little good where timing was concerned.

"Not now," Silas replied after a minute's deliberation. He had almost an hour until reveille.

"Sorry Sergeant. Captain Harms needs someone to pull security to Camp Diamondback but Alpha Company can't spare anyone…"

"Shut up soldier," Sgt. Murphy yelled pulling a pillow over his head.

"Until ten and she doesn't have enough ice to wait that long," Dumphy finished in a softer voice. "_The Count of Montecristo_," he added loudly catching a glimpse of the thousand page Monster Silas dropped in his footlocker as he pulled out his shaving kit.

"I said shut up goddamnit or I'm gonna _shut _you up," Sgt. Murphy yelled sitting up on his cot. Silas walked outside with Dumphy.

"All right Sergeant, I didn't know you read," the latter said standing beside SSgt. Silas as he set up shop before the bank of mirrors outside the latrine. There was only one other person already shaving.

"Well Dim, it all started when I got hooked on phonics." Silas rubbed shaving gel on his face. "Are you gonna stand there to make sure I don't get a boo-boo?"

"Oh, right. I thought maybe I could tell Captain Baron we'll pull security for Capt. Harms. I know it's a free day and everything but they go to all these shantytowns to treat kids free of charge and a bunch of the meds will spoil if they have to wait too long."

"That's kinda the point of Civil Affairs Dim," Silas said shaking hair and foam from his razorblade, "but I'm in anyway and don't go volunteering your lily ass to anyone without checking with me first."

"How'd you know I already volunteered Sergeant?"

"Must be that ESP acting up again," he said glaring at Pvt. Dumphy through the mirror.

------------------------------

"Can I have your spice cake?"

"No way dude, it's the only thing on this plate worth eating." Capt. Jerusalem Harms slapped her bother's hand away and cradled the pale disputed cake protectively in her palm as her security detail wandered in dressed, shaved and sleep deprived. She washed down a bite of spice cake with the semi-decent coffee in her cup and motioned for lieutenants Glass and Berro to move down the bench as SSgt. Silas approached a table tray in hand. "Get your men Sergeant, let's break bread together." She patted the seats beside her and added sing-song "I have Ding Dongs."

"Since you are giving up ping-pong and internet access," she said pulling out about a dozen pictures from a pocket in her vest, "here's what your sacrifice helps forge." She split the pictures more or less evenly in fives. "Pass them around." One by one each stack of photos got picked up. Pvt. Dumphy looked at the three photos in his hands, grimy children with none of Eddy's healthy glow; a little girl getting her first ever pair of shoes; a woman crying as sacks of lentils and flour were dropped off at her door; school-age kids lined picking out toys and school supplies from bags on the floor.

"What's this one?" Pvt. King asked showing her a picture of a handsome, dark skinned teenage boy smiling against a blue sky with no apparent good deed about him. He passed down the rest of his pictures.

"That's Sharif," Capt. Jericho Harms replied. "He's showing off his new dentures."

"Dentures Sir?"

"He had scurvy as a kid. He didn't have any teeth by 1999 so we put him in touch with an NGO in Baghdad that gets dentists to come in and donate dentures for non-emergency patients. That was his final fitting. I think he was smiling for a month."

Jerusalem put a wrapped box on the table. She pulled the undershirt from around the package and sighed at the sight of the box of Ding Dongs. The awe was almost unanimous. She pulled the tabs on one end and pulled two of the individually wrapped cupcakes. She pocketed one and opened the other then passed the box to her 2nd Lieutenant. Each man took a cupcake and the chatter died as they peeled the rare treats and revered them with silence. SSgt. Silas bit a corner of cellophane absentmindedly as he looked at all the pictures that had been passed down to his end. He saw the barefoot kids playing soccer, the crying mother, Sharif, the presidential palace in Baghdad, its gardens overrun with local orphanage children diving in and out of the pool.

He dropped the fifth picture on top of the others and shoved the whole chocolate cupcake in his mouth. The shot was iconic, Pulitzer grade. The sky in the background was a jarring blue and the polling station midplane slightly out of focus with a line of people winding several times around it. In first plane, Jamila was making a peace sign with her right hand. Her index finger was stained bright purple to the first joint and her round green eyes were lit with a hundred watt smile that made her look out of place in the arid bareness of her surroundings. He swallowed the dry chunk of cake in his mouth and turned the picture on its face not daring to double check if it was really Jamila or if he'd just imagined her in someone else's place.

--------------------------------

Capt. Harms watched from Baron's tent as her brother helped load the littler with Lt. Hunter into the back of her ambulance.

"He'll be a new man in a week," she said noticing that Baron had stretched his neck to breaking point to see the loading and unloading process. He didn't voice his immediate thought of 'keep him,' but Jerusalem heard it in the involuntary twitch of his shoulders. She picked up a pen from the desk, scribbled a name and rank on the outside of a sealed manila envelope and tossed Baron the left-over breakfast Ding-Dong. His face lit up at the sight of chocolate. Harms threw her package on one of the mail bins Baron's secretary was sorting out by squad. The man looked up at his commanding officer unsure of what to do about the package and let it go when Baron nodded his approval. He looked at the writing for cues:

SSGT Christopher Silas  
B/ 1-30 INF REGT  
APO AE 09319

Harms drained a water bottle and shook Capt. Baron's hand before reapplying enough sunscreen to sit in a microwave unscathed. She put on her sunglasses and patted her vest to double check everything from maps, the radio and the extra magazines for her holstered sidearm were in their proper places before setting out. She fastened the straps of her radio's headset to fit comfortably over her forehead and strapped her bulky helmet on top, wishing as fervently as always that whoever had invented seedless watermelons came out with lighter armor before she needed to wear a protective gear again.

"All right, it's road-trip time," she said to the men gathered in the shade of the ambulance from which her brother looked on. "We'll be together as far Camp Marez. You'll all be back to your tents by lunch. I'm driving the truck, Lt. Berro you are coming with me. Capt. Harms will be keeping an eye on Lt. Hunter in the ambulance and Lt. Glass you are driving him. I need two volunteers in the back of the truck to keep an eye out and hand out candy if we see a lot of kids, so Pfc. Nassiri who else is going to volunteer with you?" Tariq laughed, took a step forward and shook his head. Pvt. King joined him. "Thank you very much gentlemen let's roll time's a wasting."

"You know what this is missing Berro?" She asked wiping her forehead as she followed the ambulance making a u-turn south towards Mosül.

"What that ma'am?"

"A little Robert Johnson and a fucking AC."

"Remember your New Year's resolution ma'am."

"Which one?"

"You were gonna try not so say 'fuck' so much ma'am." 2nd Lt. Berro said laughing.

* * *

That's all for today folks!

Thy Author.


	7. Pit Stop

A new chapter! Wee! My cat has been very affectionate this week so her rubbing her whiskers against my fingers as I am trying to type has certainly delayed things, not that my lack of technical knowledge has helped matters either.

All the characters I didn't invent belong to FX but you know that because you are smart.

* * *

The highway to Mosül had split into smaller halves a couple of miles back when Captain Jerusalem Harms noticed the needle on the temperature gauge in the dash climbing into the red a second time. They were passing larger and larger pockets of built up areas on both sides of the road as the outskirts of Mosül gave way to the city ahead but there was still a long way to go. The convoy had stopped several miles earlier to wait for over an hour while the M998's engine cooled off. She smashed her open hand into the steering wheel and cursed out loud. Her two way radio crackled.

"Glass says to tell you you are leaking, over," Jericho's familiar baritone said from the back of the ambulance a few feet in front of her.

"How's the cargo?" She asked regarding Hunter.

"Peachy." Harms couldn't see it but her usually unflappable brother had scowled. She handed her radio to 2nd Lt. Berro.

"Let them know we'll need a tow," she ordered with her eyes on the dash.

Jerusalem slowed to the truck a crawl. She felt its load lighten when King and Nassiri jumped out of the back to scan the side of the road before the convoy could come to a full stop. The biggest threat was the presence of cholera in the stagnant sewer water pooled in every available pothole so Pfc. Nassiri gave the go-ahead. She passed the ambulance and parallel-parked behind the M1026 Humvee. Pvt. Williams' scanned the surrounding area from the gunner's turret, pointing the M60 machine gun as he turned while Pfc. Nassiri ran to meet up with Dumphy, already in front prepping the winch. She stepped out glad to be able to stretch her legs. SSgt. Silas met her across the stretched tow line.

"Do you want to stop for lunch now Sergeant? Fifteen miles per hour to Marez is going to be a while."

"Whenever you are ready ma'am."

"Don't wait for me Sergeant; I'm not spoiling my greasy cheeseburger for this shit." She patted the MRE in one of her cargo pockets for emphasis and saw Lt. Glass jump out of the driver's seat out of the corner of her eye. Her radio came alive.

"He's going into shock!" The Lieutenant yelled.

"Sepsis. Shit." Harms looked up guessing the distance between the buildings on both sides of the street. She took a folded map out of the thousandth pocket. "He'll need a Medevac. Give them the school Sergeant, it's been condemned since occupation. They can't land here," she added tossing her map on the hood of the overheated Humvee. SSgt. Silas hopped in the passenger's seat and pushed his radio headset out of the way. He located the landing zone coordinates on the Captain's doodled map and depressed the push to talk button massaging his right temple in the hopes it would make his headache go away.

Female Harms climbed to the back of the ambulance and looked at Hunter unconscious and clammy wilted on his litter, his undershirt cut down the middle. Her brother was pushing down on Hunter's chest with the heel of his hands while Lt. Glass worked around him trying to hook electrocardiogram pads to the inert chest. He moved away to make room for Jerusalem.

"Goddamn it he's in V-fib," Jericho muttered looking at the wild ups and downs of Hunter's irregular heartbeat reproduced on the liquid crystal display of the portable defibrillator hooked to his chest. He flipped the switch that made the defibrillator change from a simple monitoring device to something of a miniature crash cart and Hunter's pulse did the equivalent of cartwheels for two more seconds while Jerusalem peeled the larger resuscitation chest pads from their crinkly protective packaging.

The vocal cues on the machine rushed to match the speed with which she affixed the pads and she watched exasperated as the machine charged. Jericho pushed the shock button. Hunter's torso came off the litter and settled back down. He measured Hunter's pulse manually and removed the pads from his chest taking hair and scabs with them. Lt. Alexander Hunter was now unceremoniously over the hump. Glass unwrapped an Ambu bag, affixed the mouthpiece over Hunter nose and mouth then started pumping when it was clear the man's own intermittent attempts couldn't cut it alone. Harms stepped out of the ambulance sweating despite the air conditioning, as her brother reattached the ECG electrodes to Hunter's chest. SSgt. Silas was waiting outside.

"Nine minutes ma'am," he said answering the unasked question in the line between her eyebrows. Jerusalem nodded. "Landing zone's two blocks out ma'am."

"Lead the way Sergeant." Harms said tying back hair that had loosened working over Hunter a minute earlier. She climbed behind the steering wheel in the ambulance and inched forward behind the cargo carrier.

-----------------------------------

Ali Sayid was supposed to be keeping watch while Mullah Mohammed led the rest of his group in prayer inside the abandoned three-story school they were currently squatting but he was busy chain smoking instead. Earlier, by unanimous, democratic vote he'd been designated the sole scapegoat responsible for the loss of the over ten million dollars in heroin destroyed two weeks earlier at nearby Qadiya.

There were a lot of car bombs in ten million dollars so Ali Sayid was okay with taking _some_ of the blame. He _had_ been in charge of navigation. He _had_ been reading the maps incorrectly. He _had_ delayed the eight men with him for four days. He could admit those three things to himself. It was a whole other camel to meet Mullah Mohammed's boss and admit in front of an indeterminate number of armed, pissed off men expecting a tenfold return on their investment that he was the one they should hold responsible for the mess.

No one cared about mitigating factors in a holy war even if reading a map was very hard on a man who only knew 17 of the 28 character in the Arabic alphabet. He was sure that the American convoy he'd seen rolling into the school grounds from his lookout would be more understanding of such a conundrum which was why having to kill them didn't sit well with him as he put out his last cigarette. Ali flipped his rifle onto his back and crawled on all fours towards trap door on the roof to inform Mullah Mohammed that maybe, they'd have a little more than pure ineptitude to offer the higher-ups when they got into Mosül later that day. He had the trap all but shut over his head when he heard the now familiar swoosh of helicopter rotors cutting through the air. Ali smiled. Allah was definitely smiling down on him that day.

* * *

Did you know a giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue?

Thy Author.


	8. Without a Paddle

Whew this is the second part of what was originally just chapter seven. I decided to chop it in two because my poor little index finger actually got tired of scrolling with the mouse. See chapter 7 for the disclaimer.

* * *

When her camera man had told her she'd been fired as a war correspondent for the BBC for over billing her expense account, Johanna Gilchrist had been happy, hell she'd been ecstatic. Flights from Kuwait to Heathrow took at least nine hours and as long as she had her BBC press pass; she could get sloshed on their dime. She had fantasized about Egyptian cotton sheets, aromatherapy, Darjeeling tea and a real massage and then remembered her overdrawn bank account, her deadbeat boyfriend and her diabetic cat. It was for the latter, Count Peabody Fluffbottom, that she had accepted a job offer from an American news network that she was now pretty sure no one alive had ever heard of.

She'd been issued a secondhand PD150 DVCam with some of its previous owner (he had blown to bits playing with artillery shells) still smudged on the lens. Having met her news editor only through e-mail, Johanna's only proof of employment were the cash stuffed envelopes that appeared inside her camera bag ever Monday at noon. This Medevac fly-along where she had already puked into an empty MRE bag three times was her first relevant piece for SC Newsgroup. She'd tried to get out of going no less than six times but the news editor's last email had been very clear. To continue to receive fat envelopes stuffed with cash, she'd have to turn in something other than vague interviews with radio operators and mechanics at the motor pool.

Johanna's eyes ventured from the buckle on her seatbelt to the two men stacked in front of her. The shrapnel wounds to the face and shoulders had been loaded in the middle and his not so lucky buddy with a bloody stump for a foot on top divided by a white composite litter like a bizarre Oreo cookie. There was room for one more patient, the one they were picking up, before she could get back to the safety of base camp and hide in the bunker for a proper nap. Johanna tried to shy away from the woman closest to her, in case her rash was contagious. She'd inquired after flesh eating bacteria angling for a story that didn't turn her stomach as much as missing body parts and found the soldier unwilling to collaborate.

Her only hope for a decent story was then, thus far the remaining ambulatory patient, bitten twice four hours earlier by a little girl pissed off because he ran out of candy while on foot patrol in the vicinity of her school and Johanna was reluctant to run with that. She had a mean sweet tooth so she understood where the little girl was coming from. The helicopter lurched back readying to land and she took several deep breaths; her improvised sick bag was already half full.

"Dim," SSgt. Silas growled, "jerk off in your own time would you?" From the gunner's turret, Pvt. Williams laughed. Dumphy had been staring at Captain Harms, Jerusalem not Jericho in the rearview mirror for the better part of a minute.

"Dimwit and Hottie sitting on a tree f-u-c..."

"That goes for you too Smoke," he interrupted looking up at Williams. His uniform began flapping and he motioned for Dumphy to follow him as the Blackhawk maneuvered to land. Silas secured his goggles running towards the back of the ambulance where Lt. Berro and the two Harms' were readying Hunter. He gripped one end of the litter while Dumphy positioned himself by the other. The crew chief slid open the cabin door, their cue to move in, and they ran Hunter, being bagged by Lt. Berro the hundred meters to the helicopter. Jerusalem looked at the packed house and the overextended medic tending to it inside.

"Get out," she yelled as the crew chief slid Hunter's litter in place. Johanna turned her camera in Harms' direction, hating every inch of her body armor with the word press stamped on it as large as would fit. The crew chief, a corporal came to Johanna's defense.

"Press, riding along."

"He's in septic shock, maybe she can tube him too; make it _good_ story!" Harms countered yelling, the strain of it showing in her neck. Johanna remembered the first aid classes she'd covered four months earlier and how the work on mannequins had turned her stomach. She freed herself from the safety belts and stood up ramming the medic against one of the patients in her rush to get out without spilling her sick-bag.

"Sergeant," she screamed jumping inside, "please escort this woman to Camp Marez!"

"Ma'am you have the Nawar cesarean in Al-Falah. It's coming in breech," Berro yelled before Silas could reply. Jerusalem pieced together a meaning with the aid of the imaginary pregnant stomach Berro had traced in the air over his BDU jacket. Capt. Jericho Harms took the headset in Jerusalem's hand as she jumped back out. A little over a minute had spanned between landing and loading and the five people remaining on land double-timed it back to the parked Humvees with Johanna Gilchrist, journalist and world class sissy leading the way.

The Blackhawk achieved lift-off under Ali Sayid's eager watch. He was crouched behind the shattered water tank where he'd been smoking earlier having already made sure he was pointing the RPG launcher on his left shoulder in the right direction. He knew it was a matter of seconds before he was in some of the crew's line of sight so he aimed, took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.

To Harms, the first sign that something was wrong came in the form of a three legged dog. It was a skinny thing, all lazy and stretched out on the dirt six minutes earlier when she'd checked it was alive and not just an IED dress and now the dog was running in the wrong direction, away from the landing zone though the noise had not been a problem before. She saw Pvt. Dumphy noticing the same discrepancy and heard Silas's voice ring in her ears with an angry 'Take cover,' as the chopper shuddered its tail rotor aflame.

Johanna dived to the floor with too much momentum and left a good percent of the skin of her chin and arms right there on the dirt. She remembered the camera as an afterthought and hit the 'record' button as she pointed the lens towards the whirling Blackhawk. Had she zoomed in on the cockpit, Johanna would have captured the pilot struggling to control the forced descent. Instead she was filming the random flipping before it slammed against the ground with a crash and the landing gear splayed.

Pvt. Williams turned the M2 mounted on the Humvee toward the bluish smoke rising from the schoolhouse roof where the RPG had come from. He fired screaming; not knowing Ali Sayid was already gone. The downed chopper rocked right then left until there rotors bit into the dirt below sending debris and eventually chunks of the blades themselves flying with every turn.

Williams ducked for cover. The pilots were slumped on their seats. When there was nothing left of the blades, the chopper rocked forward one last time, tilted haphazardly so that the people inside depended on their safety harnesses to stay in place. As if on cue, small arms fire began to rain from the building.

SSgt. Silas guessed from the randomness of the rounds digging into the dirt and ricocheting off the armored vehicles that there were at least six men firing and they weren't risking exposure to take better aim. They still had the advantage of superior cover and position and he cursed as Tariq called in their location on the radio to try and even the playing field with air support.

The helicopter was as sturdy as cheesecloth and of course, drawing the most attention from the red checkered heads that never peeked long enough to play whack-a-mole. Pvt. Avery King picked off one of the men on the second floor for short lived relief.

Movement resumed in the chopper as the crew chief jettisoned one of the cabin windows and the medic began stirring strapped to his seat. Silas nodded to signal he understood Capt. Harms' intentions and grabbed Pvt. Dumphy's shirttails before he could abandon his position beside the Humvee to follow Jerusalem on that misguided sense of chivalry he hadn't been able to snuff just yet. She was closest to the crash with little more than a heap of trash for cover so toting Hunter's M4; Jerusalem made a beeline to the chopper using the sheer bulk of it as her main protection against the people firing from the other side. The crew chief threw a fire extinguisher out the window and climbed out between the whirring blade stumps above his head. He tackled the burning tail as Jerusalem tried to force the door open from the outside. It was jammed.

She moved to the cockpit door without a third try and opened its window easily enough. She pulled the release handle back and wrestled the door free. Jerusalem felt the pilot's pulse and used his clothes for purchase to climb high enough so she could see then reach the engine control levers overhead. She pushed each of them to the rear and clicked off the battery switch as well. Taking advantage of a brief lull in the shooting, she pulled herself up to disconnect the battery beside the second pilot's seat.

In the cabin, the medic was making the best of the break as well and having freed himself from his safety harness, was checking on the littered patients who'd been thrust against the cabin wall. The amputee was howling pitifully stuck one left of unconsciousness as his buddy writhed beneath him trying to ease the pressure on his hurt shoulder. Hunter's breathing was hard and fast like he was gasping for air but seeing he was getting _some_ air, the medic turned his attention to unstrapping the ambulatory patients that might be able to carry them out of the helicopter before it became a very expensive colander.

Jerusalem climbed inside the cabin through the window as another short burst of fire peppered the chopper and she began checking her brother's vitals before he came around and pushed her away. Jericho fought with the release plate in his safety belt and used one of the composite litters for support to free the man next to him, the soldier who'd run out of candy on a very bad day. He was dazed and unreliable. The medic held him while Jericho jumped out then helped him load the semi-conscious man on the Captain's shoulder like one would a sack of potatoes. Under cover fire, Pfc. Nassiri picked up the man, helping him back to safety the last 100 feet and Jericho rushed back to the chopper for the second run.

"Get in there," SSgt. Silas screamed at the journalist as the first of the wounded climbed in the ambulance. Johanna ignored him. She'd not only resumed breathing since diving to the dirt but also found enough of her inner reporter to start playing with camera angles. Not even Silas' trademark glare got her to comply. She cheered to herself when it was clear at least a second mujahedeen went down in the building and zoomed in on Pvt. Williams trying to determine whether or not he was aware of his kill.

In the helicopter the medic had turned the amputee on his stomach and tightened the wound dressings on his injured leg before crouching to resume pumping the Ambu bag preserving the few brain cells Lt. Alexander Hunter had at his disposition. Jericho unstrapped the woman whose rash had disgusted Johanna minutes earlier and slapped her hard across the face when she wouldn't stop whimpering.

"Get a fucking hold of yourself Private or I'm going to shoot you myself," he seethed entirely out of character for his everyday mellowness.

The magic words worked. She joined the crew chief to run the amputee to the ambulance as the men holed up in the school resumed returning fire. The holes in the cabin were now close enough together to get a clearer picture of just how far up shit-creek everyone was working around 300 gallons of jet fuel and while he waited for the crew chief and the two Harms worked on one of the pilots, Spc. Gomez, the medic, poked the barrel of Jerusalem's M4 through one of the holes in the chopper. He emptied the magazine on full auto and though he had no way to know it pierced a brand new through-and-through hole on Ali Sayid's head permanently modifying his health.

In the second floor of the schoolhouse, Omar Sayid looked on as the last breath of life left his brother's body. He dropped his AK-47 and crawled on all fours across the wrecked room to his brother's pack where he knew Ali kept the spare RPG-7 rounds. Had he been more in touch with his feelings, Omar might have cried. Instead, he prayed as he screwed the propeller charge to the back of six pound PG-7VL warhead. He held the round in the inside of his elbow and crawled back to his brother who still had the launcher slung on his back.

Omar saw Mullah Mohammed fall at the far end of the row of window they were using for cover but unlike with his brother he mourned the _symbolism_ of Mohammed's end more than the death itself. He'd been too meticulous, critical of Ali's grenade launcher which he saw as an unnecessary shortcut and insisting in water for ablutions when everyone knew a little sand would do in a pinch especially when one was busy fighting the infidel. He slipped the grenade into the non-flared end of the launcher remembering his brother's instructions when he'd demonstrated how his new toy worked.

Ali had been the brains in the family, never once making fun of Omar's deafness or his freakishly small head. Omar promised to take Ali's widow as a second wife to honor that as he knelt by the window closest to the downed chopper. His attention wavered for an instant to the three men falling backwards to his right. He saw the numbers of their ranks thinned to just Mamdouh and him then just him. He looked out the window at the two AH-1 Cobras suspended mid air raking the schoolhouse with the three-barrel 20 mm guns mounted under their noses and realized that even though he couldn't hear it, he was being fired upon. First Omar was struck dumb by the mediocre end to his crusade for Allah and the issue of how this anticlimatic end might affect his allotment of virgins then dead by the hail of bullets descending upon him.

He never got a chance to enjoy his last hurrah: the rocket propelled grenade he'd fired as the American's close air support finished him off, had ignited the downed Blackhawk's reserves of JP-8.

* * *

Whew! You did it! You survived chapter 8!

Thy Author.


	9. Aftermath

Again, I've opted to split 3000 words in half, mostly because I'm on a crusade against the plot holes and expository dialogue currently wreaking havoc on the second half of Chapter number 9. No author's notes. The author is trying to end this thing before it turns into Beowulf.

* * *

"_In our top story tonight, Johanna Gilchrist, SCN's new embedded correspondent in the Ninawa province confirmed that a Medevac helicopter was shot down earlier today by an RPG in the al-Hudaba neighborhood of Mosul killing its crew. Though yet unconfirmed by U.S. military officials, there are speculations that the attack was in retaliation for the destruction of a mosque by coalition forces two weeks ago in the neighboring city of Qadiya where ten Iraqi citizens lost their lives. U.S. Central Command has yet to verify the number of dead and wounded and is withholding the names of the soldiers involved pending family notification. We join Johanna in Mosul for more details."_

"_Good evening Tipper I am Johanna Gilchrist with S.C. Newsgroup. As you can see from my injuries, I got a little too close to the action today. I was covering what should have been a routine medical evacuation for the second-up flight crew of the 1159th Medical Company Detachment when they received an emergency call to pick up a critically ill soldier being transported to Camp Marez for treatment by ground troops until his convoy suffered mechanical setbacks en route."_

"_So you were in the helicopter when it crashed today Johanna?"_

"_No Tipper, I relinquished my seat at the last minute to make room for a medic. Now what I find most disturbing is how easily this conflict that cost the lives of five American soldiers could have been prevented if one of the vehicles in the convoy had not overheated. A source speaking on condition of anonymity has revealed it is not unheard of for vehicles out here to go without scheduled maintenance much longer than it is recommended and I **am** investigating these allegations for our viewers at home."_

"_Thank you Johanna. Up next we'll have U.S. Representative Barney Thompson weighing in on the issue of war spending but now let's go to your footage of today's tragic events."_

The cued tape of the crash, the rescue attempts and the subsequent explosion rolled on screen. SSgt. Silas muted the news report and kicked the helmet at his feet across the 'morale' tent. He'd been alone in there for half an hour after not even the bravest of the sergeants sitting around a card table in the middle of a game of poker dared stay when they saw him stalk into the tent and sink in the couch wearing a face best known for provoking incontinence in many a prisoner treated to the sight of it up close.

His head felt heavy on his shoulders. He pulled at the ICOM headset like it was made of something toxic and tried to focus on quadrants of the mayhem on screen instead of what any of it meant. He concentrated on the dirt on his boots as he carried the copilot out of the helicopter a second before it exploded instead of how he'd been thrown into the air by the resulting shock wave.

He tried to remember if he'd heard the whistle of the incoming grenade. The sight of Jerusalem running away from the burning Blackhawk with her clothes on fire, screaming as her features were swallowed up by the flames filled the 27" screen. She had lived for 15 minutes in harrowing pain with no way to give her morphine. Her brother's body been grotesquely quartered by the blast. The medic and the pilot had burned to death inside and the amputee flatlined on the way to the hospital. Meanwhile Lt. Alexander Hunter was expected to recover fully in a week's time.

Familiar with the story, privates Mitchell and Del Rio were standing by the entrance to the tent peering at Silas through the space between the frame and the door unsure of what if anything they should do. They'd already checked on the rest of the fire team as each of the men arrived. Dumphy's hands were bandaged to his elbows to protect the first and second degree burns he'd incurred helping Nassiri put out Capt. Harms' clothes with their own jackets and Williams and King had survived physically unscathed so both women left their squad mates alone because at least they were talking and as hard as it was to admit it, they had nothing to add.

"You can't go in there now man," Pfc. Del Rio said in a stage whisper to the man crunching gravel in the direction of the tent. He was dressed in PT sweats, looking foolish and bored. She recognized him as a fellow mechanic as he got closer.

"Blow me," he answered walking past them puffing his chest like an angry chicken. Brenda wedged her foot between the door and the frame for a better view. Del Rio stood behind her.

The mechanic sat next to Silas leaving a cushion between them. He picked up the remote and flipped through the channels with disinterest. A beauty queen waved at him from the back seat of a pimped out Lincoln at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, a pock faced man tried to look meaningful in his CSI Miami reruns. Two more news channels were running the crash footage and the mechanic picked the network with the prettiest anchor. He put up the volume as they transitioned into the video.

"Turn that off," Silas ordered in a tone resembling politeness. His Hapless Companion stared sideways, a victim of too little patience and a sore lack of brains.

"No way man," he replied turning up the volume some more. "I wanna see this." SSgt. Silas ran his hands through his prickly buzz cut and leaned in far enough to reach the 'power off' button on the console. The mechanic stood up itching for a fight. He had height and weight on his opponent so he pointed the remote and turned the news back on. Mitchell and Del Rio poked their heads into the tent. "What you gonna do now?" He asked skipping a 'fool' that would have made him sound too Vanilla Ice.

Silas leaned in towards the TV again and turned up the sound as far as it would go. He stood up slowly, surely, like someone who never had to question the outcome of any fist fight, and the Hapless Companion jumped back startled by rank, his own gross miscalculation and the fierce look in Silas' eyes when they bore into his.

"Which part's your favorite?" He yelled grabbing the man by the collar of his sweatshirt, lifting him off the ground a whole inch. The taller, heavier mechanic went limp opting for the Carlo Rizzi approach to self defense. "Don't let me stop you now!"

Silas relaxed his grip on the mechanic's clothes. The man fell on his butt and crossed his arms protectively over his face. Silas looked through him with derision. He picked up his ICOM headset and stared at the TV screen. A fourth network was now airing gruesome close-ups of Harms' charred body with a large 'graphic content' banner flashing over the images at three second intervals. He kicked the television set on the side and sent the mammoth flying a whole foot before it fell and cracked the plywood floor.

* * *

I'm hungry.

Thy Author.


	10. Lazarus

Whew. Here's chapter ten. I don't know why I had so much trouble with this. Now that I read back over it, it is rather simple.

* * *

Captain Baron looked at his watch as SSgt. Silas took a seat on his chic office furniture, a folding chair dating to the Vietnam War.

"Sergeant do you know why I've called you in here today?"

"No sir."

"You assaulted a television set last week SSgt. Silas." Capt. James Baron had to choke the pen in his hand in order to keep a straight face. The written complaint on his desk had made him laugh. He knew there was nothing funny about one of his best soldiers attacking electronics but such were the pitfalls of a developed brain in need of comic relief. "I have a whole list of equipment here you could have bludgeoned no questions asked but you went and messed with one everybody likes."

"Yes sir."

"Sergeant you're going through a rough patch. Ninety percent of the soldiers on their _second_ tour haven't seen even half of all the fucked up shit you've seen in just the past couple months. You keep turning down your chance to take some R&R when you should really be thinking about it; you've been deployed longer than most people here soldier and I am getting worried."

"I don't see how four days eating Big Macs in Kuwait are supposed to help. Sir."

"Sergeant, I knew Captain Harms since she was a second lieutenant and her brother fixed up a lot of my men in Desert Storm. I'm having trouble with this and I didn't see either of them die in front of me. I don't want this thing to hit you in the wrong place so if you don't like Camp Doha and I don't blame you for that, you need to start thinking about maybe going home for a while." Silas looked up at the sound of the word. He wanted to laugh and not because it was funny. He bit his lower lip unsure of how to respond.

"Yes sir."

"This came for you today," Baron said handing Silas what he hoped were good news. The letter had been postmarked in Bellmore a little under a month earlier. The script was clearly a woman's. "I had my XO hold it for you when you didn't come to mail call."

SSgt. Silas took the airmail envelope without looking at it. He knew where it was coming from. He knew what it said and how it smelled. He knew the letter 'i' in her signature would be dotted with a circle she might have filled in with ink or not, depending on her mood when she signed and how long since his last call. Capt. Baron looked at the letter disappear folded into a pocket with no visible change in Silas as he handled it. He reached into his desk drawer and took out his last ace.

"This is also yours." He pushed the light, bulky envelope across his desktop. "Captain Harms left it here before she uh oh what the hell the day she died."

Baron looked at Silas' face closely as the man picked up his correspondence but nothing registered there. He heard brakes screeching behind his command tent and he didn't need to look to recognize Colonel Ryan's gunner chatting with his XO outside the tent.

"All right you are dismissed Sergeant." Silas nodded, drained the glass of water he'd been offered and walked out in the direction of his tent putting on his hat as he went. Captain Baron rolled his chair closer to the fan blowing hot air his way wishing he could dive into the oversized Tupperware bowls where five water bottles were swimming in a bed of melting ice. This was the look Colonel Ryan saw on his face when he walked into Baron's office.

"Sir," James said standing.

"That's me." Ryan took off his helmet with a sigh of relief and walked towards the cool water like a paper clip to a refrigerator magnet. "What's shaking Baron?"

"Not much." Capt. Baron replied sitting back down, sick and tired of not having any advanced notice of who might drop in or what unwelcome surprises were waiting to hit him upside the head as soon as he stopped looking. "How about you sir?"

"I was in the neighborhood but don't worry, I've come in peace." Ryan sat down on a chair still warm from Silas' tenure. He took an MRE power bar out of his pocket. "The reporter's anonymous source came forward today," he said revealing useless information meant to sound important. He laughed realizing the trick didn't work on anyone with a relatively clean conscience which made Baron immune. "There's going to be an investigation of course, into how this ignominy happened right under everyone's nose."

Baron reclined his chair, trying to channel his happy place; a hot tub with Brianna Banks and Jesse Jane. No his wife wouldn't like that.

"I take it you didn't interpret the news quite like the inspector general's bloodhounds did huh Baron? Someone blew up a mosque with ten _upstanding_ pillars of Iraqi society in it and now we're arming our soldiers with bb guns or didn't you hear?"

"That's bullshit."

"I agree but when the shit hits the fan and it's going to, it'll drip down the chain of command to the lowest common denominator in charge."

"My staff sergeant," James thought out loud. His chair squeaked.

"Yeah they'll want to talk to him. It'll help if he's unavailable at least until the owner of all that heroin comes forth and we have a different way to spin the story."

"You mean to tell me that crack journalism is dictating policy now? Sir?"

"Something like that. They were making Captain Harms a Major, grooming her to take over for Mullally when he retires next year." Ryan paused to work the last chunk of power bar from the roof of his mouth. "When her name is released to the press tomorrow they won't care that she was a great soldier or that she did more to win over the locals with one ambulance and a handful of pencils than we've been able to do with millions in rebuilding money in two fucking years because the story that sells papers is all about how the stupid knuckle dragging monkeys got the pretty blonde doctor killed." He closed his mouth and his teeth clashed together like a gavel ordering order in the courtroom.

"Are you okay?" One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi.

"The Dow's down 75 points but I'm making a _killing_ on my Google stock."

"She was your wife…"

"Operative word being was," Ryan interrupted getting up from his chair. He crossed his arms over his chest defensively and looked outside.

"A divorce decree doesn't erase a ten year marriage," Baron said unsure of how much further it'd e appropriate to take the conversation despite the personal acquaintance with his superior. He looked at the back of Ryan's head. He would need a haircut soon.

"The memorial at Marez was shit. The chaplain said the same thing he's said fifty fucking times in a row." He shook his head. "They'll be buried in Arlington next to Harms Sr. complete with an Old Guard escort and a 21 gun salute. She hated that bastard you know. She said to me once she wanted to be cremated and that I should bury her ashes with her dog."

There was a long awkward silence between the moment Colonel Ryan realized he'd said too much and the time the mutual agreement surged to ignore anything remotely resembling an emotional outburst for the sake of unit cohesion in the true fashion of all Y-chromosome carrying specimens far and wide.

---------------------------------------

"Sergeant Murphy, have you seen Sergeant Scream?" Murphy looked up from his cards at Pfc. Del Rio standing in his light. He pointed behind him into the tent and tapped the table. Lady Luck was not into his new aftershave. Del Rio walked into the tent like it was the Principal's office.

"Female," she said to the relative darkness. "Sergeant Silas, Capt. Baron asked me to find you because he needs to speak with you," she blubbered.

Ozzy Osbourne answered from Silas' headphones with the second verse of Paranoid's Iron Man. Esmeralda took two steps towards his cot and tried again. And again. And again. She tapped his shoulder. Her eyes crossed trying to get a look at the barrel of the M9 pressed against the bridge of her nose and she shuddered, too scared to make a sound. Silas let go of her shoulder and Esmeralda felt her knees buckle as she took a step back. The words were stuck in her mouth and her feet glued to the floor as she tried to remember what she'd been doing in the tent to begin with.

"I'm sorry Doublewide," Silas said at last. He couldn't hear himself screaming above the music blaring in his ears. "The safety was on," he lied holstering the sidearm. He threw his headphones on the cot. Del Rio was almost translucent.

"Captain Baron wants to see you in his tent I mean office. As soon as possible. Sergeant," she whispered backing out of the room on legs like jelly.

"I'm sorry," he tried again.

Silas sat on his cot waiting for his heartbeat to get down to double digits and resumed staring at his mail trying to forget the look in Del Rio's eyes when he pushed the gun in her face. He looked at the date on his airmail letter and dropped it in the empty shoebox where it kept the others like it company. It was all noise to avoid opening Jerusalem's package. He rattled the envelope. He knew they were just more sleeping pills but throwing them out felt sacrilegious. He would have laughed at all this unwillingness under any other circumstances but then nothing seemed that funny on a month old headache and three hours of sleep a night. He ripped the top of the envelope, shook the pills free on his cot and scanned the top of the note inside.

_"She helped me set up my clinic in al-Bareed then I saw her again on Election Day. Lt. Berro took the picture for the Stars and Stripes but she was smiling because I recognized her drawing of your unit patch." _

Silas tore the empty envelope to pieces like he was looking for Waldo then flattened the sheet of note paper disappointed before he thought to try the box with the pills. He fished out the familiar picture of Jamila smiling for the camera and flipped it to the back.

al-Bareed Neighborhood

Area 611, Road 52, #6

He had to remind himself to breathe.

* * *

I'm the first to admit it; I'm a bleeding heart sentimentalist. When I was in high school, I read Pride and Prejudice until the pages were falling apart. I know I kinda killed Mrs. Al-Shahrani in one of the endings of Al-Hadith Hilton but I'm queen insofar this particular universe is concerned and if Jesus got Lazarus up and running again, so can I.

For those who might wonder when the fat lady's gonna be belting out show tunes, Miss Editor Lady is looking under the hood of the last chapter as I write this.


	11. Snowstorm

I just discovered that Humvees are keyless! A switch for the engine, a switch for the lights and off you go. To me it sounds odd, but then my keychain is so damn cool. If the shorter snippets bother you – I say this because it enervates _me_, it's done in the interest of brevity since stringing all these together would add a good thousand words in background fodder without advancing the plot an iota and that annoys me even _more_.

**_Du'aa_**: A suplication; in this case of a Qur'anic verse said for the souls of the dead by their friends and family.

* * *

"Are you really leaving Sergeant?"

Dumphy was watching his compass pack, unsure of whether he wanted to beg to come along or help him go over his packing list. Shit missions came and went. People got transferred for having sex in the laundry room and the toilet paper came in varying degrees of roughness proportional to the laxative power of the mess hall food but Staff Sergeant Christopher 'Scream' Silas could always be depended upon to be in a bad mood and to scream. It was a loud, dysfunctional constant on which to measure change but then Pvt. Frank Dumphy was getting a little long in the tooth for a real security blanket.

"Don't worry Dim, I'll bring you back a snow globe." Dumphy scratched the bandages in his hands surprised by both the humor and the sedate tone in his superior's voice. Sergeant Murphy poked his head in the tent.

"We're leaving in ten man."

Silas folded his special pass and travel orders neatly into thirds then into a jacket pocket before he slipped into his flak jacket. He slung his limp duffel bag on one shoulder and followed Sgt. Murphy to the Humvee waiting to join the convoy headed to Marez. If Silas was happy, Murphy had been made ecstatic by the prospect of a post exchange with more than three items in stock and the junk food, oh the junk food. Murphy jumped in the driver's seat and pushed the handbrake forward bursting with nervous energy.

"St. Claire get me that map?" SSgt. Silas asked settling as much as the uncomfortable seats allowed.

"Yup." Murphy said pointing to a wad of papers wedged between the windshield and the dash. Silas reached for the photocopies in question and tried to locate Jamila's street address. "Raincoats were extra," Murphy added with a sly smile throwing a six-deep strand of Trojans on Silas' lap, "those are on the house though. I fleeced Fox last night."

"What the fuck?" Silas said arching an eyebrow. He began to give them back.

"Don't ask, don't tell man." Murphy slapped the strand of condoms back to their new owner. "Just do the world a favor and get yourself laid tonight."

-------------------------------------------------

'_No soldier is allowed in the store without a weapon, by order of the camp commander.' _

Home was now close enough to smell. The promise of sleeping on a real mattress had done wonders for Silas' mood and he chuckled at the sign posted on the door to the Post Exchange welcoming the rush of cool air on his face as he walked into the store. Murphy headed straight towards the extensive selection of potato chips in the back of the store and he stood in front of the signs that listed each of the aisle's content wondering what he was doing. Would it be a current address? Would she be there? Would she want to see him? Was he an idiot? Was there any merit to Hunter's suggestion that Jamila would have latched on to anyone who could take her out of Al-Hadith?

Silas grabbed the fanciest box of chocolates at eye level then put them back. It'd been 90 degrees in the Humvee. He'd have nothing but liquid chocolate and silvery foil before even making it out of the base. Stuffed animals seemed ridiculous. He discarded music and movies on grounds of practicality and taste, –his preference for obscure documentaries was definitely an acquired taste, and he moved one aisle over questioning his sanity as he went. Two years of sandstorms and baby-wipes based hygiene changed people right?

He scanned the paperback rack and began discarding most of the available selection because he knew better than to try to woo a woman with anything by Tom Clancy or because he had no idea what half the books with interchangeable author's names were about. He looked past everything by John Grisham and every book with Fabio look-alikes on the cover and then happened upon it, an Oprah's Book Club selection, something his tenth grade English teacher would have liked, something that might not embarrass him completely if he got past her door: Faulkner's _As I Lay Dying_, _The Sound and the Fury_, and _Light in August_ scuffed but more or less intact in a pretty, illustrated box.

-------------------------------------------------

After ten minutes of staring at his phone and willing it to ring, it was pretty clear Colonel Casper Ryan didn't have any extraordinary brain powers left undiscovered. The black, dated telephone on Uday Hussein's former desk had not burst into flames, melted, moved an inch nor rang despite his undivided attention. His grip on the handset had turned his right hand white from fingertips to wrist, while he sat there waiting for a snowstorm in hell. Three more minutes ticked by on the wall clock before the phone came alive.

"Ryan," he barked.

"I'm sorry man," the other party apologized "she won't do it. I even offered more money. I'm sorry."

He hung up foregoing sundry pleasantries and relaxed his death grip on the handset wincing a he tried to stretch his cramped hand, now officially out of strings to pull and people to call. In two more hours, the late Jerusalem Harms, first packed in ice, would be loaded into a C-130 and flown home to be buried next to a father she had hated, who had died without ever bothering to know her, in a ceremony she would have despised. He took inventory of his desktop; the metro section of the Washington Post, a helmet, dusty office supplies and the useless phone.

'_Captain Jerusalem Heather Harms, 36, of Alexandria, VA died September 27th from third degree burns following the explosion of a Medevac helicopter by enemy forces in Mosul, Iraq. She is the 1,903rd US soldier to die in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the 41st female fatality of said conflict...' _

Ryan traced the outline of her face in the obit's picture and the tiny black print beside it where his face would have been if the photo hadn't been cropped to fit. The picture came alive in his mind with painful detail: the room service operator's confusion when Jerusalem ordered two quarts of ice cream for breakfast, the maid who snapped the shots, their suite in the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, the smell of her skin, how she wouldn't stop running her hands against his three day beard, the dimples in her smile when she jumped on his lap for the second photo; everything about the last time she had been his wife.

"I'm sorry baby," he managed choking on the words.

He pulled the helmet closer to him and caressed the camouflaged lining, thumbing each of the letters in the nametape tenderly, like one would baby a child. The 'h' and the 's' in the name were scorched leaving only the 'arm' in the middle to identify the former owner. Ryan turned the helmet upside down and reached in the concave bowl to pull out one of the gray foam donuts everyone seemed to purchase though they didn't make the helmets that much more comfortable. He closed his hand around the cheap synthetic padding and buried his nose in it telling himself it smelled like her strawberry shampoo even though it sat in the sun for days in a makeshift memorial made up of her brother's and the other casualties' gear before he could make off with it.

He had failed the only person to ever see him at his worst, the only person to ever matter beyond how thy could be exploited, to see him naked of all the shit, of all the filters he needed to do his job and accept him at that basest, barest form. He only realized he'd been crying because the front of his jacket was wet to the touch.

-------------------------------------------------

Al-Bareed was fairly well patrolled and the section of Road 52 that Silas was interested in was in good enough repair, urban, boring, a barber shop, fruit vendors, kitschy trinket stands set up for the soldiers on patrol with disposable income and bored enough to spend. He'd done his homework and it'd been lucrative for Cpl. St. Claire to the tune of fifty dollars, his price to keep Silas' interest in the locals under the radar barring torture; unlikely for a supply clerk. No one in their right mind wanted Mop & Glo that bad.

"I'll wait for five minutes," Murphy said once both men were satisfied anvils were not going to rain down from the heavens, nothing was going to blow up, get shot at, or be otherwise martyred in the vicinity of their vehicle and that it was safe to step outside. "If I don't see your ugly head I'm going back to base 'till shift change and if um if anyone asks, you are um… busy with a new outreach program," he added clearing his throat conspiratorially.

To Murphy growing amusement, for the fourth time in one day the company grouch found something funny. He watched his friend walk down the side of a garden and reappear half way up a haphazard stairwell with the wrapped gift he'd refused to show him secured protectively under his free arm. Silas vanished behind a bend in the stairs but his shadow danced on the opposite wall as he changed his weight from one foot to the other. Murphy started his stopwatch never losing sight of second floor praying in Gaelic. He too had an affectionate friend to visit for some rest and recuperation of his own and he didn't want anyone cramping his style. A door opened with three minutes to go and Murphy doubled the speed of his supplications, smiling widely when the door closed behind his fellow Ranger. He'd gone through twenty Hail Marys when the watch's beeping let him off the hook.

Silas would have liked to yell 'do-over' when he heard Jamila's voice through the door asking who was knocking and he yelled a simple 'it's me.' Me who he'd asked himself preoccupied not noticing the speed with which the locks on the door were turning and the smile on her face only after she threw herself around his neck and pulled him into the living room speaking excitedly in Arabic, much too fast for his transient familiarity to make any sense of the words.

"_Allâhu Akbar_," she whispered letting go of him, calmer now. "God is great." Hesitation crept into her stance. She loosened the black veil around her head and put it back up again.

"I like your new haircut," Silas said trying to get rid of whatever had dampened her joy. Jamila's hair was short, cut almost like a man's and in a completely different way, the look still suited her.

"Doctor Jerusalem cut it, it's easier to hide the scar this way," she said self-consciously covering the three inch spot on the right side of her head that her ex-husband had scalped her five months earlier. Silas pulled her closer having shed his helmet and his M4 on a chair. She had a neat pink scar in her neck over her vocal cords from surgery to repair a fractured larynx and lighter scars on her chin and along her jawline where her headscarf pins had cut her face in two places during the same struggle. He brushed the older scars with the back of his hand and kissed her lower lip.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be," she said simply, kissing him back. "I must turn off the stove!" Jamila disappeared with a blur of dark blue fabric in her wake leaving Silas alone in the living room free to look around. The furniture was spare, shabby and functional, nothing like the luxury of the house in Al-Hadith. The tile work and the finishes in general were as shoddy as the work on the stairs outside with tiles crooked or missing entirely and gaping holes between the window frame and the wall. He scanned the paperbacks crammed into several flimsy, squat bookcases trying to see if she had the Faulkner books he'd bought at the Post Exchange.

"Do you want tea?" Jamila asked from the kitchen. "It's fairly fresh. I think. Sit down."

"Okay." Silas untied the strings holding the curtains back and let them fall over the windows before he sat on the edge of the sofa holding the wrapped books like they were a cure for cancer. Jamila came out with a teapot in one hand and two highball glasses in another.

"The good china is for state dinners," she said pushing a coffee table closer to the sofa before setting down the old teapot.

"Are you okay?" He asked taking the proffered tea, noticing the palms of her hands were callused.

"I have a vegetable garden," she said following his eyes. "It's not forced labor, look." Jamila lifted the curtain and pointed outside to a patch of brown dirt and tall, sickly plants that didn't look very different from weeds. "They are supposed to be corn but I'm not a very good gardener." Silas looked at the scraggly shrubs he'd passed on the way up deciding then and there to keep his comments to himself. He coughed trying to clear some of the ground mint leaves stuck on his throat. "Tea's not my thing either." She laughed, taking his glass. "Don't worry, I won't make you drink any more, I know it tastes like dishwater."

"I brought you something." He put the books on her lap, feeling decidedly sophomoric at almost 32. "I hope you haven't read those yet." Jamila peeled back the corners of the pretty green paper and turned the books over on her lap. She skimmed through each of the titles separately with tears in her eyes. "Is something wrong?" He asked. The chocolates might have been better after all.

"Is it true Doctor Jerusalem died?"

"Captain Harms?" She nodded wiping her face with a sleeve.

"Yes, she was killed," he said swapping died for killed, _needing_ to make the distinction.

"_Inna lil-laahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji'oon_." Jamila whispered the **_du'aa_** for the dead and clutched the books to her chest. "I kept hoping the Mullah was lying. She brought me books when I was in the hospital." She was talking to her hands on her lap, trying to steel her voice. She looked up fiercely. "Did you get the bastards who did it?"

"Yes."

She was quiet for a long time.

* * *

Oh yeah and even though technically this was all supposed to be one chapter, I had to chop it agian. It was over 5,000 words!

Thy author.

Bianca: You'll notice I vetoed your Ryan objection. Coffee's on me.


	12. Ghosts and Robbers

Here is the shorter, T rated version of Chap. 12. I've left only what adheres to the rules of what a younger audience may read. If you are interested in the way more explicit original version where the consenting adults engage in a lot more than just minor suggestive adult themes; it is available as a stand alone story titled '**_Happy Birthday Ranger_,**' but since it's got a rating of M, to access it, you must either select all the stories **Rated** **M** in the 'Over There' fic front page or the similar **Fiction Rating: All**

**_Abaya_**: an over-garment worn by some Muslim women.

**_Burqa_**: opaque veil worn in addition to the traditional headscarf.

**_Laa_**: no.

**_Purdah_**: thepractice of requiring women to cover their bodies (as with a **_burqa_**) and conceal their form.

* * *

"Come. I've drawn you a bath, you smell like my goat." Silas looked at Jamila for a second, expressionless, until he realized she was teasing him again.

"Occupational hazard," he said at last, embarrassed because he knew she was right even though he'd showered twice before leaving camp.

"Silly man." She pushed him into the small bathroom. "Can't you see I just want to get you naked?"

She knelt at his feet and started working on the bootlaces as he tackled everything else hanging off him, vest, holster, jacket, undershirt, when did they start issuing so much crap? Jamila held on to each shoe as he freed one foot at a time then unbuckled his belt, yanked his pants free of his hips and tugged on the white boxers last, her progress businesslike, like she could have been undressing a door. This gave Silas pause.

"What's wrong?" He asked pulling her up.

"That thing," she said glancing at his M9 on the edge of the sink. "It's pointed at my head." He took the handgun in his right hand and turned around so they faced the same direction.

"Look the safety is on." He showed her the switch. "It disconnects the trigger." Jamila arched an eyebrow. Silas dropped the magazine and aimed down and at the wall. He slid the action, checked the barrel and showed her. "See? Nothing to worry about." He tried to smile reassuringly but reloaded the handgun and set it on his clothes by the tub when she turned around.

"You'll stay then?" He asked lowering himself into the hot water making a noise like a cat's purring as the relaxing heat began seeping into much too tired everything. Jamila nodded kneeling by his head.

"I think the projected benefits," she whispered in his ear beginning to massage his knotted shoulders, "more than justify the initial risk to investors."

"Mmmm, I love it when you talk dirty."

Jamila filled a mug with the water in the tub, nudged Silas forward and poured it on his head. She worked up a lather with soap between her hands and began washing his neck and back, kneading away the tension with expert fingers that lingered longer than necessary enjoying toned muscle where she'd only known weird fat deposits and unsightly back hair. She dampened a washcloth in the sink, let it soak more water and used it to rinse the soap. Silas leaned back down trying to forget everything except Jamila's hands on his body. It wasn't as easy as he would have liked.

"Does your husband know where you are?" He asked at last.

"He did."

"What changed?"

"He has gone to **_Atham_**," she replied eventually though looking away to Silas' feet, cleaning between his toes with the washcloth. He was ticklish.

"What is that? **_Atham_**?"

"It is one of the gates of **_Jahannam_**, hell. In the holy book," she added resting her head on the edge of the tub, petting his stomach absentmindedly as she talked, jumping from freckle to freckle "it is a valley of molten brass around the Mountain of Punishment. Every day the sinners get new skin and once it is roasted through, it is replaced, again and again until Judgment Day."

"He died then?" Jamila was quiet for a long time. When she answered his question it was in a cold voice that begged nothing else be asked.

"Yes; while I was in the hospital recovering. At first the police suspected one of my brothers but they finally realized it was just freak accident. He was cleaning his revolver one night and… it was his time. Allah called him." Silas shivered. In her own very vague way, Jamila had just confessed and he was pretty sure to what.

"If you are going to keep doing that," he said taking the fingers painting figure eights on his skin and kissing the tip of each playfully, "you should think about joining me in here." Jamila splashed the water. She stood up.

"And ruin my beautiful new dress? I think not." Silas pulled Jamila closer to him as she shed the **_abaya_** over her head. She was naked underneath except for the rigueur arm covers like fingerless gloves and unflattering wool stockings that reached mid thigh.

"Still not into layering?" He ran his hand down the side of Jamila's leg and looked up, trying to get up to her eyes but never making it past her nipples.

"I could slip into a sexy little **_burqa_** if you don't approve; we can play ghosts and robbers," she said with a half smile. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she peeled off the arm covers. Silas hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her, laughing, into the water with him.

----------------------------------------------------------

Forward Operating Base Danger, Tikrit Presidential Site:

First and second lieutenants Kinder and Dahl were oblivious to just how ridiculous they looked in matching X-Metal Juliet sunglasses at opposite sides of an office door in an ornate palace marbled to the hilt and no one around seemed to care enough to make either man aware of this littlest of facts. They were slumped on low slung bucket seats with M4s on their laps facing a 650 pound crystal chandelier they'd been pelting with wads of chewed up notebook paper for the better part of an hour. Extra points were assigned for any projectile that stuck to the gold plates around the lowest tier of crystal baubles without falling to the floor below. They perked up slightly as the newly relieved switchboard operator, Sgt. Wilson bounded up the stairs.

"Hey how come you're all still here? What's up with Martinez?" Wilson asked making eye contact with Kinder with several stair steps left to go. He didn't wait for an answer. "Is he busy right now?"

"What you need him for?" Dahl replied with a question of his own. Wilson unfolded a poster printed on letter sized glossy paper.

"Check this out; Candy Caine at the USO show in Spelcher. That's a former Hustler Honey right there," he added fondling the woman's picture. "Mmmm what I wouldn't give for a piece of _that_." He moved towards the door, to knock on it and found Dahl then Kinder blocking his way.

"Come on, the truck for Spelcher is leaving in like five minutes and the driver wants me to clear it first."

"I wouldn't do that unless you _really_ wanna be writing to your mama from Alaska man," Kinder said. Wilson looked from the poster to the closed double doors and back. He looked at his watch. Two minutes till the truck left.

"I'll take my chances. Come on, announce me." Kinder shrugged shaking his head as he knocked on the door.

"Kernel," he drawled in that weird accent of his that made his 'colonels' sound like popcorn remains "Sgt. Wilson here to see you."

There was no immediate answer from inside the office and Wilson found this reassuring. He straightened his uniform and reached out for the door but found Dahl and Kinder had turned the handles instead. Stray notes from one of Bach's unaccompanied cello suites wafted out of the office as a stapler zoomed past his head close enough to graze his week-old haircut then settled with a noisy crash on the chandelier instead. Wilson bit his floppy desert hat, whispered a quick prayer and rubbed his head thankful for second chances.

----------------------------------------------------------

It'd taken them a while to make it to the bed but comfort after a quickie in the cramped bathtub had finally trumped the appeal of the other more immediate chairs they'd passed on the way. Silas lowered Jamila onto the mattress and began peeling off her wet socks from legs planted on either side of his chest. He let his hands explore leisurely; payback for all her earlier teasing when she was dressed and had the advantage. When they fell asleep later, he had added the words for 'faster,' 'harder' and five different ways of praising Allah to his knowledge of the Arabic language.

"Told ya," Dahl pointed behind Wilson at a phone's handset curled around the topmost tier of the chandelier. "Martinez wanted to go to the show too," he added.

"Come back tomorrow," Kinder offered struggling not to laugh. "He should be out of shit to throw by then"

"What crawled up _his_ ass?" Wilson muttered before the part of his brain that controlled what he said to people several pay grades above him in the food chain was back up and running again.

"Wife died." Dahl said sitting back down again.

"He was married?" There was shock in Wilson face.

"Ex-wife," Kinder corrected.

"So what's the problem then?" Wilson asked. Candy Caine took a backseat in his mind. In a pinch, he wouldn't need more than the poster already in possession, a little imagination and a serving of mayonnaise. "I was fucking _over the moon_ when I gave _my_ wife her walking papers."

"They were still… friendly if you know what I mean."

"You been going through his trash there Mikey?" Dahl popped a mint in his mouth. He'd been keeping Kinder company for two hours without a cigarette break.

"Intelligence starts in the home." This was one of his daily affirmations. He had glued an outline of his morning routine to the inside of his shaving kit. Stand before mirror. Admire your potential. State affirmations 10 times. Brush teeth. "Besides I don't need to. I handle _all_ his correspondence."

Wilson was still standing in front of them, waiting for a punch line. His mind couldn't grasp the concept of mourning for an ex-wife as defined by the vernacular.

"You know that Medevac chopper that was shot down in the al-Hudaba? The woman was his wife…"

"You mean the blonde?" Wilson whistled considering the possibilities. No. She was a decorated war hero. She was dead. Even he had standards.

"Yup."

"He's been trying to reroute her body or delay shipping all morning. She didn't want to be buried but looks like it's gonna happen. I really don't want to be in Taylor's shoes when word gets around she was the one who rubber stamped all the shipping paperwork man."

"Like what's he gonna do to her fool? Article fifteen her ass for doing her _job_. This ain't the fucking mafia." Dahl was pissed off. There was only so much of Kinder's bullshit he could withstand without some nicotine to take the edge off.

"What does he want with a body anyway?" Wilson continued.

"Jazz funeral." Dahl crunched more mints. "They're shipping her to Virginia though. I think it's only the stepmother left and she don't give a shit."

"You think he'll let me go to Spelcher man? I know Taylor."

"How well?"

"Biblically," Wilson whispered averting his eyes. Cardinal rules of gentlemanly behavior such as 'don't' kiss and tell' only applied to gentlemen.

"I think he might just drive you himself." Kinder grunted. Ryan's head popped out of his office then the whole of him and Wilson began to stand in attention until Ryan signaled otherwise.

"Why don't you do the world a favor Lieutenant," Colonel Ryan boomed behind Kinder's ear lifting the man off his chair by the collar of his body armor until he had recovered enough footing to stand in attention, "and stop thinking so much."

"Yes sir. Sorry sir."

"Make yourself useful."

"Yes sir."

"Type up your reassignment orders to the 377th. Congratulations, Lieutenant, you are shipping out!" Kinder processed the funeral music still seeping out Ryan's office and didn't dare ask if he was serious. Survival _was_ about instinct after all. "Sergeant," he continued "why don't you step into my office for a second? I think we should talk."

----------------------------------------------------------

"What is this?"

"A Jhelam stole." Jamila took the scarf from his hands and wrapped it around his neck.

"So this is cashmere," he said examining the garment-care label.

"A hundred percent." Silas took both ends of the rich, coffee colored scarf in his hands. He saw the designer's signature quilted into the cloth in a lighter thread. "Keep it; it brings out your eyes."

"This is too expensive Jamila."

"Don't let a brand name fool you Sergeant; I nicked that from a shop in Sloane Street." She laughed at his straight face.

"All the big name designers in London have these invitation-only sales for rich Muslim women observing **_purdah_**," she continued. "They close down the store, break out the caviar and send all the men out to lunch. Anyway, Mustafa was trying to impress some obscure Saudi diplomat at the time and when the man's wife asked if I wanted to join her, Mustafa had to say yes. He gave me his AmEx Centurion card to open a charge account with Louis Vuitton and told me I could buy anything I wanted." Jamila scooted towards the edge of the bed and shrugged into a robe folded over the footboard.

"I spent over 50,000 pounds in less than an hour. I must have ordered one of everything they had in stock and _still_, the shop girl wouldn't look at my face. I took that scarf off a mannequin and just… walked out of the store."

"I'm sorry."

"Why? Did you ever work for asinine luggage designers?"

"That the world is so fucked up," Silas said, suddenly aware that the moment was gone and the comfort of her bed and the easy way their bodies fit together were fleeting commodities at best. He sat beside her on the edge of the bed, with his hand on the small of her back. "I'm going home," he said after a while. "I don't know if my unit will still be assigned to Mosul when I get back."

Jamila took a deep breath. She got up and walked to the window. The sun was getting tired.

"I trust you," she said examining the grass "and that's a lot more than I can say about anyone else right now so whatever it is about me that makes you disregard common sense and show up at my doorstep; I'm glad I have it."

"I'm not trying to…"

"**_Laa_**," Jamila interjected. "I don't need an explanation. You are welcome to visit… whenever and it's okay if you don't."

"Thank you," Chris said joining her by the window where she was looking intently at her goat ruminating by the sickly corn. He hugged her waist and hid his face in the arch of her shoulders brushing his lips against her collar bone until she started giggling. Jamila turned around and sought his mouth with hers. Their kiss lingered. He pinned her hands above her head and began exploring the hollow of her throat up to the scar on her neck and continued to her chin, and back to the curve of her breasts smothering in her skin the growing desire to hang a do not disturb sign on the door and stay in her bed until the world began righting itself. Jamila moaned contentedly.

"Let's go back to bed," she whispered. "There's still time till shift change."

* * *

Finis a'ight!

Thy Author

PS: There are some slight changes between this version and '**_Happy Birthday Ranger_**' but nothing that changes the overall gist of the song.

PPS: This is now, officially, a trilogy. Part 3 is coming soon.


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